04/28/05

LC050428

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Politics happens, but when it's the second mayor's race in three
months, who cares?

Herb Katz>> If it doesn't bother me, why do I care about you?
I think that's wrong. If I don't go downtown Los Angeles, then
I don't care what's downtown? Yes, I do, and I think we have to
start thinking beyond our block.

Val>> And then, the book was a cultural phenomenon, but how
does "Hitchhiker's Guide" rank in the galaxy of film?

It's all 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>> Okay, so Los Angeles is electing a mayor, but millions of
Southern Californians who don't live in Los Angeles are saying
so what? How does that affect me? Well, in fact, the behemoth
Los Angeles affects the entire region whether it be traffic,
smog or the housing shortage. Toni Guinyard went to some
surrounding cities to see just what kind of an impact Los
Angeles makes on their quality of life.

Toni Guinyard>> The ballots are in and it's a repeat of the
mayoral race the city has seen before in 2001. Now we'll watch
it again along with millions of Southern California residents
who don't even have a say in Los Angeles city politics, but have
a stake in the outcome. Do you care who's elected mayor of the
city of Los Angeles?

Herb Katz>> Yeah, I care. I care too much.

Toni Guinyard>> Santa Monica mayor pro tem, Herb Katz, cares
because he knows the person who sits in the mayor's seat at Los
Angeles City Hall has the potential and the power to impact
policy and the quality of life in nearby cities. Katz moved to
Santa Monica in 1963. As an elected official, he has a front
row seat to witness the often frustrating way problems are dealt
with in one city that inadvertently affect another.

Herb Katz>> It's basic physics. You push at one end and
something else bulges at another end, whatever it is, and
homelessness certainly did.

Toni Guinyard>> Homelessness. It's a big city problem shared
by Los Angeles and Santa Monica.

Herb Katz>> We've welcomed the homeless, for instance, and it's
been over-welcomed and our citizens are now saying we've got to
do something regionally.

Toni Guinyard>> It's one of many issues Katz believes needs to
be addressed by mayors working together rather than standing
alone.

Herb Katz>> The mayor says I'm the mayor of Los Angeles and
that's what I do. That's my goal. I was elected in Los Angeles
and I'm working with Los Angeles. I think they have to start
saying no, no, I'm a mayor in Los Angeles, but I must work in
the state of California and certainly in the region of Southern
California.

Toni Guinyard>> Katz is not the only elected official outside
of Los Angeles promoting a regional approach to dealing with
city issues nor is he the only elected official monitoring the
Los Angeles mayor's race and listening to what the candidates
have to say.

John J. Duran>> Well, I'm looking at them because whoever wins
that race is going to impact my city.

Toni Guinyard>> West Hollywood Mayor, John Duran.

John J. Duran>> People are very opposed to development here in
West Hollywood, some people are, and they say no more
development. We don't want any more traffic. Well, even if we
didn't build another thing starting today, it wouldn't matter,
given whatever Los Angeles is going to do all around us.

Toni Guinyard>> While city limits are clearly defined, the
boundaries are blurred when it comes to addressing what many
consider to be individual city concerns. How best to deal with
transportation issues, traffic is the common thread tying city
to city to city. It was a key campaign issue in the primary and
is expected to be an issue addressed by candidates leading into
the runoff election.

John J. Duran>> I think they've all thrown out traffic light
synchronization which, to my mind, is just tinkering with the
bigger problem. I mean, it's a nice idea, but it's really
tinkering. It's going to require multi billions of dollars to
construct what we should have constructed eighty years ago.

Herb Katz>> Transportation. If it doesn't bother me, why do I
care about you? I think that's wrong. If I don't go to
downtown Los Angeles, then I don't care what's downtown? Yes, I
do, and I think we have to start thinking beyond our block.

Marsha Ramos>> Los Angeles traffic issues certainly impact
Burbank.

Toni Guinyard>> Unlike some other local elected officials,
Burbank Mayor Marsha Ramos puts a positive spin on the
relationship between the city she represents and the mayor of
Los Angeles. In this city of one hundred thousand people, Mayor
Ramos says there are benefits to riding on the coattails of Los
Angeles.

Marsha Ramos>> I think it's a matter of -- the city of Los
Angeles mayor has a very loud voice and that's because of the
population. So certainly when the loud voice of the mayor of
the city of Los Angeles speaks up, everyone pays attention,
everyone listens. Where we certainly have a voice, we do not
carry the kind of clout that the city of Los Angeles carries
throughout the state.

Toni Guinyard>> Ramos says Burbank has a closer working
relationship with Los Angeles city council members whose
districts abut her city compared to the mayor of Los Angeles.
In her opinion, leading a smaller city has its pluses,
especially when luring business and industry.

Sharon Ramos>> They took a look at what Los Angeles payments
were and requirements were going to be. They looked at us and,
hello, we welcomed them aboard.

Toni Guinyard>> Decisions made or influenced by the mayor of
Los Angeles could have a negative or positive effect on
surrounding cities and some elected officials won't admit they
favor one candidate over another. But they do say the person
who makes it into the mayor's seat will make a difference in
their community.

Steven Rose>> I believe that the choice of the people of Los
Angeles will have an effect on the city of Culver City.

Toni Guinyard>> In Culver City, one concern is how the person
voters elect as Los Angeles's mayor will address the planned
expansion of LAX. The initial proposal came from Los Angeles
incumbent mayor, James Hahn. Mayor Steven Rose is worried about
what is not addressed in the Environmental Impact Report.

Steven Rose>> The EIR that LAX has prepared talks about traffic
leaving LAX, but as soon as it arrives at the border of Culver
City, it disappears. We need answers about where the traffic is
going. People don't live in one city, work in one city and shop
in one city, that we are a very mobile community in Southern
California, so we have to be aware of what the effects of
development in one city is going to have on another.

Toni Guinyard>> Just days before the primary election, the Los
Angeles Times ran a full page ad promoting its election coverage
and posing the question "Why should L.A.'s mayor matter to you?"
Reasons listed in the ad include the need for affordable housing
to the need for more police, fixing the education system in
schools to dealing with SigAlerts.

Herb Katz>> We all know how bad our traffic is and you can't
solve it city by city.

John J. Duran>> Most of the traffic patterns in West Hollywood
are not people who live or even work here. They're people
passing through trying to get to Century City, trying to get to
Beverly Hills or UCLA or going the other way trying to get to
Hollywood.

Herb Katz>> The Santa Monica Freeway going home at night,
meaning west, I laugh at the people going east. They're bumper
to bumper and I'm skidding home. That means they've all been in
Santa Monica all day and they're all going home to Los Angeles
or other cities. It's got to be regional.

Toni Guinyard>> City officials in communities surrounding Los
Angeles clearly have reason for concern and are speaking out now
to ensure the next mayor of Los Angeles knows they are watching
and ready to react.

John J. Duran>> We're all just getting washed into this and I
hope that the mayor of Los Angeles is cognizant of that and,
when he thinks about fraud or public policy, he's got to
remember all the other cities and how we're impacted.

Herb Katz>> I think it's provincial and nimbyism. I got mine.
Why should I let you in, whoever you are and whatever the issue
is? Or I don't have mine and I want mine. People have got to
start thinking more broadly rather than just of themselves
unilaterally.

Marsha Ramos>> We're pretty much an island within all of Los
Angeles, so am I frustrated? I would say no. I like to protect
my island.

Toni Guinyard>> In many ways, these cities are islands, some
almost completely surrounded by Los Angeles, but fighting to
keep from being overrun by Los Angeles's big city problems, all
recognizing the impact the mayor of Los Angeles could have on
the cities they call home.

John J. Duran>> I guess I would say to the mayor of Los
Angeles, don't forget there are eighty-seven other cities in the
county of Los Angeles and that we're impacted by the decisions
that are made by the big city of Los Angeles.

Toni Guinyard>> I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and
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Val>> We here in Southern California are well aware that
Latinos are a majority in Los Angeles, but we may not realize
that Latinos are also a majority in small towns like Liberal,
Kansas and Dalton, Georgia. It's that side of Latino culture
that Los Angeles Times reporter, Hector Tobar, went in search
of. He put his observations in a book called "Translation
Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking
United States". You went on a major road trip, in a sense,
visiting Latino communities throughout the entire United States.
Well, what did you find?

Hector Tobar>> Well, I discovered that what we see in Los
Angeles, you know, the Spanish-language radio stations, the
Spanish-language newspapers, the soccer leagues, that sort of
sense of Los Angeles as a Latino city, that that's being
exported from Los Angeles across America to places like Rupert,
Idaho and Dalton, Georgia, and that in a certain sense, Los
Angeles is helping to define in the twenty-first century of what
America is going to be.

Val>> So, in a sense, the communities that are created here by
Latino families or whatever are literally moving to Idaho and
Georgia and South Carolina?

Hector Tobar>> There are probably tens of thousands, if not
hundreds of thousands, of Angelenos who have relatives, cousins,
uncles, brothers or sisters, who have moved to Clay County,
Alabama, Memphis, Tennessee, Rupert, Idaho, to these different
communities to sort of seek better fortunes because, you know,
it's kind of hard to live in Los Angeles. The wages are good,
but the cost of living is high, so people are looking for this
sort of new frontier that they're going out to settle.

Val>> So what kind of welcome, if that's the right word, are
they getting in these rural small towns?

Hector Tobar>> Well, I think at least up until very recently,
the welcome was a big embrace. Places like Dalton, Georgia
which is the carpet capital of the United States were just
really happy to get these Latino families --

Val>> -- because they were workers, right?

Hector Tobar>> They're people who come to work in the night
shift of the carpet factory or the jobs that nobody wants to do
in the chicken plants. So in many, many small towns, there was
a sense of like here are these newcomers, let's welcome them,
they're hardworking families and let's see if we can make life
better for them. In Dalton, Georgia, they spend more per
student in the public schools than they do in Los Angeles by a
factor of two or three.

Val>> But at some point, does this honeymoon period come to an
end?

Hector Tobar>> Well, definitely it does. I think that when a
city, for example, like Dalton becomes more than fifty percent
Latino or a place like Liberal, Kansas also becomes more than
fifty percent Latino and people sort of started to see some of
the problems. You'll have a gang from Los Angeles and suddenly
gang signs are seen on the streets of Liberal or, you know, a
Salvadoran gang will appear in many small towns along the
Eastern Seaboard.

Then people start to say, well, wait a minute. This is a little
bit more of a complex phenomenon than we expected to have. In
some towns that I visited in North Carolina and Georgia, there
have been marches of the Klan. You know, people saying let's
take back our country. Then more mainstream voices of people
who feel that, you know, their Deep South is being changed.
It's not my mother's Dixie, you know, and we need to sort of do
something about this.

Val>> Now you mentioned the Klan. They actually had a specific
march in certain towns to protest the Latino presence there?

Hector Tobar>> Oh, yes, they did, definitely. It was something
that happened in the late nineties and it's happened since.

Val>> There's still anti-immigration movements even here in
California. I mean, especially in California.

Hector Tobar>> Definitely there is a very strong anti-
immigration movement and I think a lot of it comes from a sense
that people have that their country is changing. That's part of
what my book is about. The Latino immigrant comes to this
country and his children really are changing the United States
in very subtle ways. They're changing the civic institutions of
this country.

They're changing the way of being a citizen because eventually
the people who are here who have come illegally or who have come
with, you know, papers that are going to run out or whatever,
they're going to become permanent residents. They're already
permanent residents. They're paying social security taxes and
they are established institutions. Those institutions, whether
it be the soccer league or whether it be, you know, the flea
market on the weekends outside the towns, that is really
changing --

Val>> -- or the Pentecostal storefront churches.

Hector Tobar>> Or the Pentecostal Evangelical churches. In
fact, I visited recently the newest church in north Alabama
which is a Latino Catholic Church. I visited the newest church
in Dalton, Georgia which is a little cathedral. Actually, it
was not a little cathedral. It was actually quite a large
church that was built with the needs of the Latino Catholics
who've come to the parish with their needs in mind. So there
has been sort of this rebirth of a lot of religious institutions
even.

Val>> Would you say that, in a sense, it's a positive thing
that's happening? That in general, they are a positive
influence in these small towns?

Hector Tobar>> What I think is that it's the same American
story that's always been told. This is what I say in my book.
What's happening in the twenty-first century United States is
the same thing that happened in the nineteenth century United
States except that, instead of Italians and Germans and Jews,
it's Latinos.

Val>> And instead of New York --

Hector Tobar>> -- and instead of New York, it's Los Angeles,
it's Dallas, it's Houston, and that in the same way that Italian
immigrants left their mark on not just American civic culture,
but just on American culture in general, that the Latino
immigration is going to be something that shapes American
culture in ways that are very profound and that we're just
beginning to see. But at the same time, people come here to
become eventually Americans.

I consider myself -- I grew up in Los Angeles when the public
schools were the envy of the rest of the United States. I
carried the flag in my elementary school in East Hollywood,
California. I recited the Gettysburg Address. But at the same
time, my father taught me to be proud of being a Guatemalan and
that we had this history, this other history that wasn't in the
textbooks, that was a part of who I am. I thought I was
different that way.

I thought my father, who wanted me to always speak Spanish at
home, was sort of an oddball, you know, because everybody wanted
to learn English and stuff. English is the language of success.
English is the language that you triumph in. But they also
don't want them to forget where they came in and it becomes
easier to do that when there are radios and stores. That
identity is definitely sort of more and more a viable option to
consider yourself -- like I consider myself to be in my soul a
citizen of the Americas and also an American citizen.

Val>> Well, Hector Tobar, thank you so much for a most
enlightening road trip and putting it all together in a book,
"Translation Nation".

Hector Tobar>> Thank you very much.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us
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Larry Mantle>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm
Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC. Our first film this week is based on
the very popular novel by Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy".

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> We're joined this week by critics Lael
Loewenstein of Variety and Scott Foundas of Variety and the L.A.
Weekly. Scott, you start us on "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy".

Scott Foundas>> You know, I went into this movie knowing
nothing about the huge cult surrounding it. I'd never read the
book. I'm not familiar with the radio series and that kind of
thing, so I was a virgin audience to this and I thought it was
just terrific. I was so captivated by the huge imagination of
this project which is about a sort of every-man British guy
named Arthur Dent who just so happens to be the last surviving
member of the human race when the earth is destroyed to
accommodate a sort of intergalactic superhighway and ends up
traveling through the galaxy in the company of the president of
the galaxy played by Sam Rockwell and an alien creature played
by Mos Def named Ford Perfect who rescues Arthur when the world
is destroyed.

This is a movie that has a wonderful sort of primitiveness to
it. The whole thing looks like it was made in somebody's back
yard with very low-tech special effects and a kind of throwback
to the old "Dr. Who" television series. It's the antithesis of
what you expect. It's not one of these big digital effects
extravaganzas and it's wonderfully optimistic.

Larry Mantle>> Lael, what did you think?

Lael Loewenstein>> Well, I was also one of the uninitiated, but
I had an absolute opposite reaction than that which Scott had.
I thought it was almost an unmitigated disaster in every way
that I regard. I mean, technically it fell short. A lot of the
editing, I thought, didn't really match. The sound mix was very
poor, I thought, and plot-wise, I just had a lot of trouble
following it. I was all for the reverence and the anarchy of
Doug Adams' book and series, but it just didn't work for me. It
was just absolutely chaotic and it just completely fell apart as
far as I was concerned.

Larry Mantle>> Next up, we have the action flick, "XXX: State
of the Union".

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Well, not to be confused with an adult film,
"XXX: State of the Union", a sequel.

Lael Loewenstein>> I was a big fan of the first "XXX" starring
Vin Diesel and directed by Rob Cohen. This, to me, lacks all of
the fun that that movie had. It goes much more for a kind of
unintentional camp. It basically takes the plot of every
presidential assassination movie and just recycles it. The
dialogue is rehashed. You don't have very interesting
characters or very compelling action scenes.

What you have is Ice Cube as this kind of renegade super-agent
who's hired by Samuel L. Jackson to defend the president and the
honor of the United States and you have Willem Dafoe as a bad
guy, radical, right-wing guy who's bent on bringing down the
president. To me, this movie was just so rote and so overdone,
there was absolutely nothing inspiring or fun or enjoyable about
it.

Larry Mantle>> It sounds like it could have been funny.

Lael Loewenstein>> It could have been. Sometimes it was a
little laughable.

Larry Mantle>> All right. Scott, what did you think?

Scott Foundas>> I completely agree with Lael. This movie is so
aggressively stupid that you just have to wonder how anybody
ever approved the script. Ice Cube is so miscast in the lead
role. I mean, he is about the least threatening sort of, you
know, macho action hero imaginable. I mean, he's much better
suited for the kind of teddy bear role that he played in "Are We
There Yet?" earlier this year which was a big hit for him.

That's really the least of the movie's problems. You know, the
president in this movie played by Peter Strauss is like
something out of a television miniseries circa 1965 or
something. I mean, everything is so wooden. Even the sets look
like cardboard. It's a terrible picture and some of the worst
special effects since I don't know what.

Larry Mantle>> So not even a good bad film? It couldn't even
work on that level?

Scott Foundas>> Well, I mean, you know, I can't deny that I was
laughing a lot of the time, but it was certainly unintended.

Larry Mantle>> And our final film this week is the British
period film starring Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, "Ladies in
Lavender".

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> "Ladies in Lavender", Scott?

Scott Foundas>> Well, I've been saying since I saw this movie a
couple of weeks ago that the title sort of gives you an idea of
what the target audience for the film is. This is sort of the
epitome of what people mean when they say Masterpiece Theatre
style filmmaking and mean that in a bad way. I mean, really the
worst films of Merchant Ivory films look like action movie
spectacles next to this thing which is about these two spinster
sisters who rescue a castaway that washes up on the beach
outside of their house.

This is set in Cornwall in the days leading up to World War II
and eventually it turns out that this guy is actually a violin
prodigy who is fleeing from increasingly anti-Semitic eastern
Europe and trying to make his way to America. But the movie
becomes more about how one of the sisters played by Dame Judi
Dench develops this sort of what I found creepy attraction
towards this guy. You know, she's old enough probably to be his
grandmother, but she develops this sort of, you know, romantic
attraction to him and then, when he finally falls in love with a
woman his own age, acts in an increasingly irrational fashion as
old people are often asked to do in movies.

Larry Mantle>> Well, we have seen certainly the gender reversal
on that with the much older man and younger woman. Lael, what
did you think of this film?

Lael Loewenstein>> Well, I think I was a little kinder to it
than Scott. It's so wonderful to see Dame Judi Dench and Dame
Maggie Smith play anything. I'd be willing to listen to them
read the newspaper, you know. But for me, the movie was a
little toothless. It was lacking in the sort of conflict that I
would have liked. It was such a gentle kind of walk on the
beach that it lacked any real sense of drama or energy. I
thought Charles Dance's direction was a little bit flat.

That said, you know, watching Judi Dench play the slightest
gestures like picking up a lock of hair from this young man or
Maggie Smith cast a disapproving glance at her sister, you know,
they get so much nuance out of just the littlest gestures that
it was actually really lovely even though I was mixed and a
little disappointed.

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 Scott Foundas of Variety and the L.A. Weekly
and Lael Loewenstein of Variety. We invite you to join us again
next week at this same time for another 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. Our
thanks to the folks at Skylight Books in Los Feliz for lending
us their venue. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and
Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you tomorrow.

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 didn't even know what ChoicePoint did until he got a letter
in the mail.

>> "We have reason to believe your personal information may
have been obtained by unauthorized third parties and we deeply
regret any inconvenience this event may cause you." Twenty-five
years down the drain of trying to do everything right to protect
myself.

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