02/23/05

LC050223

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

He's called an earth architect and his work is attracting
attention from tourists, colleagues and especially prospective
homeowners.

Gabi Craconas>> It's affordable for people who don't have any
kind of like budgets for houses.

Saul Gonzalez>> Who can't afford this real estate market here.

Rusty Perez>> This is Southern California. Everything is so
expensive. It's like a good way to go.

Val>> And then, it doesn't take a vineyard to make a wine.
We'll show you one man who does it in his own kitchen.

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 person you are about to meet has an idea that could
change the quality of life for millions of people around the
world, people who live in shacks or huts or have no homes at
all. The answer, as you'll see, could be right under our feet.
Saul Gonzalez goes to a small desert town to meet an earth
architect who's getting a lot of attention.

Saul Gonzalez>> This is where one out of every six human beings
on earth lives, in squalid, ever-growing slums that stretch from
Mexico City to Jakarta, Nairobi to Rio de Janeiro. Millions of
other people, refugees from war and natural disasters, are even
more destitute, living in teeming camps for years on end. Yet
thousands of miles away from the refugee camps and shantytowns
of the developing world in a rapidly suburbanizing Mojave Desert
community of Hesperia, one architect experiments with ways to
design and build decent, even beautiful, homes for the world's
poorest people. His name is Nader Khalili.

Nader Khalili>> I think it's human rights. I think it should
be part of our constitution of this country that human shelter
is just a right, just like the human right for government, for
freedom, for food. Human right for shelter.

Saul Gonzalez> The shelters that Khalili builds on his thirteen
acre desert compound are simple yet elegant. They are
structures that seem to echo the architecture of past centuries
and civilizations, including Khalili's native Iran. What unites
the architecture is what the buildings are all made out of, raw
earth. To Khalili, it's the most abundant and egalitarian
building material on the planet.

Nader Khalili>> One, of course, it's everywhere, available to
everybody.

Saul Gonzalez>> The essence of Khalili's architecture is
simplicity itself. Make a hole and start packing the earth into
long tubular sandbags which you then begin stacking together,
attaching them with barbed wire. He calls the process Super
Adobe Construction.

Nader Khalili>> You create these coils like ceramic coils. You
make pots with coils. Then you put earth in them, you tamp it
after dampening it and you add like five to ten percent cement
to it and it becomes very strong and permanent. You put them
together, these coils, just like pots and then you create the
spaces you want in different formations.

Saul Gonzalez>> Khalili says his architectural principles can
be used to inexpensively build everything from spartan emergency
shelters, say, for refugees to luxurious and ecologically sound
single family homes.

Nader Khalili>> The plan is like a clover leaf. It is four,
you know, petals. Each one is a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom
and an entrance.

Saul Gonzalez>> Like a proud father, Khalili shows off the
features of one of his designs, a four hundred square foot home
built for about ten thousand dollars.

Nader Khalili>> You are building something that is fireproof,
healthy. Look at this paint on the wall. Milk and linseed oil
and lime. Look at the way this place is cool. Here, it's a
very good one to open up. Here is what's called wind-catcher.
You catch the wind in the summer. It comes in.

Saul Gonzalez>> It's a chute. It's a wind chimney.

Nader Khalili>> Just like in a chimney. And on top of the
wind, if you want it to be very fancy, you can put a sail to
catch the wind and bring it down. Down here will be planters to
get the moisture.

Saul Gonzalez>> You're cooling the house naturally. You don't
need air conditioning.

Nader Khalili>> If you want it to be less cool, you close it.
You know, you adjust it.

Saul Gonzalez>> Tired of the competitive rat race, Khalili who
once designed skyscrapers walked away from a successful
architectural career more than twenty-five years ago. He says
philosophically his designs now are about rediscovering the
architectural wisdom of the past and erasing the border between
our built and un-built environments.

Nader Khalili>> We've lost this main essence of architecture
that is really building in tune with nature. The architecture
that we are creating is really trying to control nature, control
the air conditioning, control the building, the concrete, steel,
plastic, constantly to show this mastery.

Saul Gonzalez>> Khalili, who some in the design world see as a
utopian dreamer, others a genius, has become something of an
architectural guru over the last decade. Every year, thousands
of people come to his Hesperia Research Center called Cal-Earth
to listen to Khalili speak about architecture and its connection
to social and human rights.

Nader Khalili>> "That's one of the reasons I believe so much
homelessness exists in the world because half of the population
of the world is pushed aside."

Saul Gonzalez>> Visitors also wander through Khalili's designs,
including a small village of homes he and his assistants have
created. Many come just to gawk and take pictures, but others
are here because they actually want to build their own homes
using Khalili's architectural principles. One reason, cost.

Rusty Perez>> I like the one they have, the two bedrooms and
two baths, like this. I believe it's four hundred square feet.

Saul Gonzalez>> Rusty Perez and Gabi Craconas want to build one
of Khalili's earthen homes on their property in San Diego
County.

Gabi Craconas>> The price is really good and it's affordable
for people who don't have any like budgets for houses, you know.

Saul Gonzalez>> Who can't afford this real estate market here
in Southern California.

Rusty Perez>> In Southern California, everything is so
expensive. It's like a good way to go. I mean, it's safe, it
looks all right.

Iliona Outram>> Even the floor is the same material. It's
concrete.

Saul Gonzalez>> For some, a single visit here can turn into a
passion for Khalili's architecture and philosophy and design.
That's what happened to architect, Iliona Outram.

Iliona Outram>> Sometimes all you need to do is mix the cement
in, shovel of cement with a wheelbarrow.

Saul Gonzalez>> She came here from Britain fifteen years ago
out of curiosity and hasn't left, becoming Khalili's
architectural soul mate and wife.

Iliona Outram>> I was fortunate that I arrived just when he
brought the first group of students to this land and every day
seeing those ideas manifest by putting a shovel in the earth,
creating a pile of earth and a hole, starting to build a dome,
every day like that, you're seeing it unfold and that is what's
kept me completely captivated day by day (laughter).

Saul Gonzalez>> You're still mesmerized.

Iliona Outram>> It's still mesmerizing. I don't have children,
but I feel that every day it's like watching something grow and
be born.

Saul Gonzalez>> Khalili's work has won international design
awards and even the attention of NASA, which believes his
construction principles could one day be used to build habitats
on the moon and Mars. However, Khalili admits that he has yet
to be accepted by most in the mainstream architectural
community. He says he's sustained in his work by the words and
ideas of the great thirteenth century Persian poet, Rumi.

Nader Khalili>> For me, as Rumi says, to have a quest is really
the answer to all your desires, just to have it. The quest is
this passion. It gives you so much energy and passion in your
life.

Saul Gonzalez>> As he continues his quest, the challenge facing
Khalili is convincing others he's found a way to offer shelter
to the world's neediest. For Life and Times, I'm Saul Gonzalez.

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Val>> He's taken more than a million photographs of his best
friend. A little excessive, you say? Well, not when you
consider that the best friend is Muhammad Ali and the
photographer is the legendary Howard Bingham. Well, now the two
have teamed up to produce the largest coffee table book ever
published. Philip Bruce got a close look at this extraordinary
volume.

Philip Bruce>> When Howard Bingham took up photography, he
thought he was leaving heavy lifting behind, but then came
"GOAT", short for the Greatest of All Time, a heavyweight book
about the heavyweight champ of boxing. We thought Howard was
kidding when he hauled the book in on a cart, but soon enough we
discovered he wasn't.

Howard Bingham>> Easy now, because it's heavy.

Philip Bruce>> Yeah, thanks for telling me (laughter). At
seventy-five pounds, it's more of a coffee table than a coffee
table book and, as we struggled to get it out of the box, it's
clear that Howard is just a little anxious to see the finished
product for the first time. It's big, all right, but is it
good? We'll find out in a moment. But first, a little side
trip down memory lane when Howard Bingham met a young fighter
forty-two years ago.

Howard Bingham>> I was with a black weekly paper called the Los
Angeles Sentinel and my assignment was to cover this big loud-
mouth coming to town. I never heard of him before because I
wasn't interested in boxing then and I wasn't interested in the
Olympics. So I went to the news conference and introduced
myself and took a photograph and left.

Later on that afternoon, I was driving down Broadway in Los
Angeles and I saw him and his brother on the corner of Fifth and
Broadway just standing at the bus stop. I thought they were
waiting on a bus, so I hollered out and said, hey, you need a
ride? They said no, they were just hanging out. I said I have
some errands to run and, if you want to see Los Angeles and meet
some people, I'll take you around. So they said, okay, fine.

Philip Bruce>> That's how the friendship began and, from that
unlikely start, Howard Bingham has had a ringside seat to
history watching as a young Cassius Clay transformed into
Muhammad Ali. He's captured most every moment of it on film.
Reporters and photographers don't normally become best friends
with people they cover.

Howard Bingham>> Yeah, but Ali was a special individual. You
know, it was a great fortune for him to meet me (laughter).

Philip Bruce>> The images show that Bingham has the eye of an
artist and he could have hardly asked for a better subject. To
look at these photos is to peer inside the soul of Ali. His
triumphs and his tragedies went far beyond the boxing ring and,
every step of the way, Howard Bingham was there with his camera
with the kind of access that only a friend would have. What's
it been like being near him through this incredible life? I
mean, he has had a life that not only will go into the history
books, I mean the history is still being written.

Howard Bingham>> Oh, man, it's unbelievable. I think that I'm
the luckiest man alive, you know. What I do, how I do, you
know, I have to really thank him for meeting me and thank him
for giving me the opportunity to be your friend, and I was his
friend too. Just to have seen the world with him and to just
meet people, you know, kings and queens. You know, just
everybody all over the world.

Philip Bruce>> The fight pictures are what made Howard famous.
When Ali was King of the Ring, major magazines like Sports
Illustrated and Life couldn't get enough.

Howard Bingham>> All of the Ali fights were events. You know,
they weren't just fights, they were events. It was a place for
people to be even if they weren't at the fights. Just to be
around the hotels because they were all big shows. People would
come in dressed and to show off just to be seen. It's
wonderful.

Philip Bruce>> But the adulation of boxing was nothing compared
to the huge crowds that turned out when they went to Africa.
That's where Ali met Malcolm X. The trip changed the lives of
both men.

[Film Clip]

Howard Bingham>> That was when we saw Malcolm on the way over
to Mecca. We met and talked.

Philip Bruce>> We've seen that portrayed in the movie.

Howard Bingham>> In the movie, yeah.

Philip Bruce>> How accurate was that?

Howard Bingham>> Pretty accurate. Very accurate.

Philip Bruce>> That was a real milestone in his life. I mean,
that changed Muhammad forever.

Howard Bingham>> Malcolm too, yeah. Malcolm went over there
and said he saw Muslims in all colors, you know, so it was a big
experience for him. That's what changed him.

Philip Bruce>> How did he react to how he connected with not
just black kids, but white kids? In the late sixties, he stood
for so much for so many. I mean, what did that mean to him?

Howard Bingham>> Well, I don't think that even now he
recognizes how much influence that he's had on people all over
since he's been involved, you know, since he's been
controversial with the Muslims and with the draft and just with
everything.

Philip Bruce>> It's no wonder then that Howard is a little
nervous about the new book as the wrapping comes off for the
first time.

Howard Bingham>> Boy, you can get a hernia picking this up.

Philip Bruce>> You sure do. That is beautiful, gorgeous.

Howard Bingham>> This here is the 1967 fight with Ali after
knocking down the big cat, Cleveland Williams. Here we go.
"Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

Philip Bruce>> This is it.

Howard Bingham>> This is it, Jack. I mean, Phil (laughter).

Philip Bruce>> The publisher has spared no expense. The book
is bound in Louie Baton leather by the same people who do work
for the Vatican. They'll only produce ten thousand copies.
Some will sell for $7,500 each and each one carries Ali's
personal autograph. But to Howard, the pictures are what
counts. He's one of two principal photographers. Will he be
disappointed at how it all turned out? Hardly.

Howard Bingham>> To see this and to know that this is going to
be here forever, you know, this is amazing.

Philip Bruce>> Even for the great Howard Bingham who has been
everywhere and seen everything, the experience is unique. His
photographs have been reproduced on these pages in flawless
detail and each one has its own story.

Howard Bingham>> And this is Ali's favorite photograph because
these are his idols. This was taken in 1962 in Los Angeles
here. Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Lewis, the dancer and the
puncher.

Philip Bruce>> Ali may be the star, but Howard Bingham is
clearly a featured player with some time in front of the camera
as well as behind it. There are many personal photographs of
the two friends sharing enough adventures for ten normal
lifetimes. To leaf through this book is to experience their
walk through history.

Howard Bingham>> Who else could you imagine that could warrant
a book like this that would ever sell at this price?

Philip Bruce>> And it's been an amazing journey for Howard
Bingham, almost unimaginable for a struggling kid from South Los
Angeles who flunked out of Compton Junior College and wondered
if he would ever land a real job. You've not done bad for a guy
who flunked photography class.

Howard Bingham>> (Laughter) No, knock on wood. As I said,
I've been a blessed human being. I'll be sixty-five in May and
I'm still going, and will go.

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

Life and Times
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contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val>> There are about 850 wineries throughout California and,
together, California wineries put out ninety percent of all the
wine produced in the United States. But you don't have to have
a winery, a vineyard, or even a tasting room to be a winemaker.
I met one very serious winemaker in a very unexpected place.

Would you believe this is a winery? Just a typical suburban
home in Torrance, and inside you'll find Ed Masciana. He
doesn't need vineyards to make his wine. He's what the wine
world calls a "negotiant".

Ed Masciana>> That's a pretty common term in France for people
that basically negotiate a price with a producer to buy some of
their bulk wine in bulk. You know, stuff that they for some
reason are not going to use in their own winery or, in a case of
French producers, a lot of them own vineyards, but they don't
have the wherewithal to produce wine and sell it, so they
produce wine and sell it in bulk.

Val>> So what you're really doing is taking existing wines, re-
blending them into your very own hopefully better wines.

Ed Masciana>> Correct.

Val>> So you don't go to Trader Joe's and get Two Buck Chuck
and make it Four Buck Chuck or anything.

Ed Masciana>> No, no, because if I did that, I'd be illegal
(laughter).

Val>> (Laughter) Oh, really?

Ed Masciana>> What we're going to do is we're going to start
with the Syrah, okay? So I'm going to pour a little bit of that
and we'll taste it.

Val>> Just like it is? This is how you bought it?

Ed Masciana>> Just like it is, right. This is how I bought it.

Val>> From some unnamed winery.

Ed Masciana>> From some unnamed winery, correct. There are a
lot of unnamed wineries in California, Val.

Val>> Perfectly nice Syrah.

Ed Masciana>> There's one thing that bothers me about this wine
and it always did and that is the finish. It has almost a
metallic sort of finish to it. It doesn't finish kind of
smooth. So I added a Cabernet to it.

Val>> So now you're adding just a little bit of the Cabernet?

Ed Masciana>> That's correct. About nine percent is what it
ended up being.

Val>> Nine percent Cabernet.

Ed Masciana>> It's not going to be too easy.

Val>> Let's not worry about making a mess.

Ed Masciana>> Well, messes can be cleaned up. It's the mess
that you make when it's in the bottle that you can't clean up
(laughter).

Val>> Okay, Syrah and a little bit of Cabernet.

Ed Masciana>> About nine percent Cabernet.

Val>> Nine percent Cabernet.

Ed Masciana>> Now would you think that that would make much
difference?

Val>> A tiny bit.

Ed Masciana>> Okay. Well, now you notice how it kind of
rounded out that middle palate and it got rid of --

Val>> -- the sharpness is a little --

Ed Masciana>> -- Some of the sharpness is starting to fade.

Val>> According to my very fine palate (laughter).

Ed Masciana>> You have a very fine palate, Val, obviously
because you could tell that.

Val>> He starts with unlabeled wine, but once they're bottled,
they bear the name of Peralta. The bottling happens in northern
California and Ed has never actually been to the bottling plant.
When he started out in 1981, he produced fifteen hundred cases.
Today he's up to eighteen thousand cases of wine.

Ed Masciana>> Okay.

Val>> Third step. What kind of wine is this?

Ed Masciana>> This is Malvazia. This is a slightly sweet white
wine. Now you're going to think what is this guy doing, okay?
Putting white wine into red wine? In France, the most famous
area for growing the Syrah grape, they always add a little white
wine. It's called Viognier and it has very similar
characteristics to Malvazia. The difference is, this is a lot
less money and I need to sell this for ten dollars, so I can't
put in Viognier. This is going to round out that finish again
even more, which is what I was really aiming for. On top of
that, I think it's going to let it age a little bit more.

Val>> Well, now, that really changed it. That really changed
it.

Ed Masciana>> And that's only four percent.

Val>> Now it's very smooth.

Ed Masciana>> Yeah, very smooth. You still haven't lost the
character of that Syrah, but now you've got the smoothness,
you've got the finish and you've gotten rid of that sharp edge.
That's what we do.

Val>> Very nice.

Ed Masciana>> Thank you.

Val>> It's, what would they say, gregarious without being too
much.

Ed Masciana>> Oh, that's very good. I'm going to use that line
and I'm not going to give you credit for it. Some people will
think I thought of that line (laughter).

Val>> Ed has converted his hall closet to a wine cellar where
he keeps his most prized vintage.

Ed Masciana>> This is out of my private collection. This is a
1937 bottle of wine that is considered one of the greatest
dessert wines ever made and I had it --

Val>> -- made in Germany?

Ed Masciana>> Yeah, Germany. It's a dessert wine from Germany
that has, in the past, been known to live as long as seven
hundred years. Pretty amazing.

Val>> You'll drink that one day?

Ed Masciana>> I don't know. I drank it once with a group of
friends who all admitted, and still to this day and this was
seventeen years ago, that it was the greatest single wine they
ever had in their lives.

Val>> You drank another bottle? There was another bottle?

Ed Masciana>> This is the second bottle and I'm not sure what
I'm going to do with it.

Val>> You can't die without drinking that.

Ed Masciana>> But I already did. I drank the first one. Do I
need to drink the second one?

Val>> Yeah (laughter).

Ed Masciana>> Okay, fine, or do I want to sell it for ten
thousand dollars? (Laughter) See the quandary I'm in, Val?

Val>> (Laughter) Right. Ed has taught classes and written a
book on wine. He says, after twenty-four years of being a
negotiant, he has no interest in growing his own grapes. Now
why don't you want to have your own real winery with grapes and
vines and all that wonderful --

Ed Masciana>> -- if I had brick and mortar and I had to pay
people and pay workers' comp and all the insurance and all the
other things that go on with owning a business, there is no way
I could sell these wines for that kind of money. Absolutely
none. As a matter of fact, when I taught many classes on wine
appreciation, my favorite class was huge. It was what I called
the Economics of the Wine Industry.

I would ask the students, okay, guys, you want to own your own
winery? This is so romantic and it's beautiful and there are
sunsets over the vineyard and you just go, yeah, yeah? Okay,
here's what it costs. By the time we were done, every single
time, the cheapest wine we made was forty dollars. There is no
way they could make a wine for under forty dollars a bottle.

People have leveled the charge, well, how can you have
consistency from one year to the next? Well, I have the
potential to have consistency better than people that own a
piece of land because, every year, you've got to farm that piece
of land. The weather patterns are going to change every year.
You're not going to have the same wine every year. If I have a
various number of people that I do business with that I get
wines from, if they're different that year, I get more of it
from someplace else because I'm going for a flavor. I'm going
for taste components, not a specific appellation. When you kind
of get that mindset, then that's what you go for. Too many
people in the wine industry want to force their wine opinion on
everybody else. I just want to sell it (laughter).

Val>> Well, Ed Masciana, thank you so much for giving us a
little bit of insight into negotiant.

Ed Masciana>> My pleasure.

Val>> Boy, I've had some tough assignments, but that was a
tough one. 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 --

He's been Los Angeles's mayor for four years. Now he wants the
job for another term and some voters are asking what has James
Hahn done for us lately.

James Hahn>> Brand new developments, mixed housing and retail.
We have over a billion dollars in new development coming in to
Hollywood. We've brought gang crime down by sixty percent over
the last year.

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