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Life & Times Transcript
07/26/06 Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times -- Beachgoers love its sloping shores and gentle waves, but so does something else. Chris Lowe>> Seal Beach is kind of unique in that about a quarter to a third of all the stingray-related injuries reported in the United States occur right here at Seal Beach. Val Zavala>> And then, it's about history and the future and it resulted in the world's largest photograph. We take you inside Orange County's Legacy Project. It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times. Announcer>> 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 Zavala>> Seal Beach has the highest concentration of stingrays than any other beach on the United States coast and that means hundreds of beachgoers will get to know stingrays in a very personal way. But why are they attracted to Seal Beach and is there anything we can do to reduce their numbers? Jim Hill talked to scientists who have been trying to figure it out for the past six years. Jim Hill>> People flock to Seal Beach every summer to splash in the gentle waves or catch a few as the warm swells break over sandbars at the San Gabriel River mouth. Others stay on the dry side and catch a few rays. But all too often, these beachgoers end up stepping on a ray instead, a stingray, that is. Gary Boyd>> It's just a huge smack on either the top or on the side of your heel. Actually, that is a very sharp pain. Christopher Mull>> When someone steps on top of the animal like that, they'll actually jerk their tail up and jab you with the spine here. Lisa Christiansen>> Pretty intense. On a scale of one to ten, I'd say about ten and a half (laughter). It does. It hurts. It gets your attention. Jim Hill>> The culprit is almost always one of these, a round stingray. They're only about the size of a saucer or small plate, but halfway along their tails, these little rays pack a wallop. Chris Lowe>> The spine itself is actually a modified scale, but it's shaped like a serrated steak knife. So when it cuts into your skin, it's designed to get the toxin into the wound and then that toxin causes the wound to swell and be extremely painful. Jim Hill>> And it happens here a lot, so much that surfers nicknamed the place "Ray Bay". The rays at Seal Beach may be the most stepped-on stingray population anywhere. Lifeguards say that, during a busy summer, anywhere from two hundred to five hundred people come hobbling out of the surf with a painful injury usually somewhere on their foot or ankle. That means that somewhere between a quarter and a third of all ray-related injuries in the coastal United States happen right here along this stretch of beach. A team of scientists has spent seven years examining the ray problem, making these perhaps the most studied stingrays in the world. The researchers from Cal State Long Beach have netted, studied and released thousands of stingrays here since 1999. >> "Can we get someone to run this bucket back and get a fresh bucket?" Jim Hill>> After clipping the spines for safe handling, they've measured, weighed and tagged the rays. >> "180. It's a male. Jim Hill>> Tracked their movements and taken tissue samples for DNA population studies. >> "DNA is going to be 1333." Jim Hill>> They say the rays may be lounging off Seal Beach because manmade features here made the area a lot like the warm estuaries where round rays gather to mate. Chris Lowe>> Well, you know, the urbanization of these areas definitely has improved the habit for these rays. Jim Hill>> Most notable, power plants up the San Gabriel River discharge heated water through this channel and right to the beach. Chris Lowe>> One of the things that makes Seal Beach unique is the fact that the water temperatures tend to be warmer here than they are at any of the neighboring beaches. Jim Hill>> The round rays seem to like other manmade features as well. Rock jetties and nearby breakwaters keep the surf and currents on the calm side and they help keep the bottom here sandy with a gentle slope. Susanne Plank>> If you like warm water, you're going to go where the warm water is. It's the same with the stingrays. And stingrays obviously like a smooth, sandy bottom with very little turbulence. Jim Hill>> And people like that too. Susanne Plank>> People like that too. Jim Hill>> Professor Lowe and his team have tried to find ways to reduce stingray injuries since people and rays both love the conditions here. They've tried netting masses of stingrays and painlessly clipping the spines, but the spines grow back. Chris Lowe>> We caught and we clipped the spines of sixteen hundred stingrays in a summer and it had no effect on the rate of stingray injuries at Seal Beach. Jim Hill>> Rounding up round rays and moving them to a new location doesn't work either. Susanne Plank>> You can ship them out, but honestly, there's so many stingrays around here, you're not going to get them all. Jim Hill>> Meanwhile, Seal Beach lifeguards have had to become stingray experts in their own right. They can quickly spot a victim in the crowds along the shore. Joe Bailey>> And when they start coming out of the water is when the pain starts coming and that venom starts taking effect and they start doing what we call down at the lifeguard department the stingray hop. They kind of start hobbling out on one foot. Jim Hill>> Less than an hour after Bailey told us that, one of the young researchers walked up to him with a painful sting on the finger of her right hand. Jennifer Granneman>> Ow, it hurts (laughter). Well, I was trying to get some of the catch out of the net and I guess a stingray was underneath the fish and I didn't see it there and I stuck my hand right onto its stinger. Jim Hill>> Lifeguards use a treatment that is simple and effective. A one-hour soak in hot water breaks down the stingray's toxin. >> "The hotter, the better." Jim Hill>> The researcher was a lot calmer than many sting victims and she was soon back on the beach with her colleagues. But preventing a sting is clearly better than soaking a throbbing hand or foot in a bucket of steaming water, and that's where the stingray shuffle comes in. Chris Lowe>> What you really want to do is just kind of shuffle your feet along as you move along and that way you'll have a chance of scaring the rays away. So as you enter the water, you just want to shuffle your feet. Christopher Mull>> It really works and I've been in situations where we've been ankle deep in rays and, just by shuffling my feet, I haven't gotten stung. Jim Hill>> The shuffle is promoted so heavily here that it's almost become a Seal Beach dance craze. Do you know what the stingray shuffle is? >> "Yes, I do. I learned it as a child." Jim Hill>> Do you know the stingray shuffle? >> "I do. Would you like me to show you?" [Film Clip] Jim Hill>> I guess that's a circular shuffle. We also found this short shuffle. There was a stationary shuffle, and a stingray power shuffle. The researchers say they'll continue poking and probing stingrays to try to unravel the mystery of Ray Bay, why so many stingrays of one species congregate on a half mile stretch of coastline. It's complex work in a complicated environment where nature and humans mix with often unpredictable results. But for everyone else on Seal Beach, the lesson of living with rays is a simple one. Do the stingray shuffle. I'm James Hill for Life and Times. Val Zavala>> And now for this Life and Times story update. We've reported on Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's controversial attempt to take over the LAUSD. The mayor may win partial control of the district if a bill in the state legislature passes. Now the mayor has taken another step. He's appointed former superintendent, Ramon Cortinez, as his deputy mayor of education. Cortinez is a seasoned and respected administrator. He'll advise the mayor and serve as his representative to other city departments and commissions. We talked with Cortinez back in 2000 when he was interim superintendent. Even then, he was fighting school district bureaucracy. Ramon Cortinez>> I think adults get caught up in doing a job. They get caught up in paper, developing plans, having meetings. Sometimes I said, "What are you doing to improve academic achievement in the schools?" I got the comment, "Well, I go to this meeting and I go to that meeting." I'd say, "No, what are you doing to help teachers?" "Well, I go to this meeting." See, there was a disconnect. It's not that they weren't busy. It's not that they were disingenuous, but we lose focus. Val Zavala>> The current Los Angeles school's chief, Roy Romer, is retiring. Cortinez says that he's not interested in the job and that he can make a bigger impact by helping the mayor gain more control over Los Angeles's schools. Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times". Val Zavala>> Question: take all the people who play video games. Now what would you imagine the average age is? Would you believe twenty-nine? I'll bet that's older than you thought. That's caused one author to dub these people "rejuveniles", adults who just can't put the toys away. Is it healthy play therapy or just immaturity? Saul Gonzalez talked with a self-confessed rejuvenile and author, Christopher Noxon. Saul Gonzalez>> Christopher Noxon, thanks for joining us on Life and Times. Christopher Noxon>> Thanks for having me. Saul Gonzalez>> The premise of your book "Rejuvenile" is that increasingly there are Americans who take the pleasures and pastimes and play of their childhood into their adult years. Christopher Noxon>> Right. Saul Gonzalez>> Take it from there. Christopher Noxon>> Well, I started thinking about this really seriously a few years ago after the birth of my second kid. I now have three. I had a minivan and, you know, a mortgage and all the real trappings of an adult life and yet I still felt like a kid. Huge parts of me still felt very childlike, you know. I met my wife playing kickball. I dressed in Converse high-tops that I wore when I was, you know, in elementary school. You know, as a primary parent, I spent a lot of my time eating Popsicles and watching SpongeBob and having an amazing time (laughter) and playing with my kids in ways that my own family found kind of ridiculous. Saul Gonzalez>> And then you looked around and discovered, wait a second, this isn't just me. This is a whole segment of the American populace doing the same thing. Christopher Noxon>> Yeah, it got me thinking a lot about adulthood and what that meant. So I started talking to a lot of other parents and then a lot of other people my age and then a lot of other people of all ages. Something happened within the last fifteen to twenty years, and I talk about that a lot in the book, where this kind of breaking down of what sociologists call age norms, the things that have sort of dictated what is appropriate at certain times in your life, have eroded. Saul Gonzalez>> That line in the sand between what we do as adults and what we do as children. Christopher Noxon>> Right. And so many of us have sort of found out that there are all these things that we loved as kids that there's no censure about still doing. Saul Gonzalez>> Explain then, Christopher, some of the traits and customs and habitat of your typical American rejuvenile. What is he or she interested in? Christopher Noxon>> You know, it ranges from adults who play kid games. You know, I had my entry into that with kickball, but it's also going on with dodge ball. There's two rock-paper-scissors leagues now playing. There was a fifty thousand dollar rock-paper-scissors championship in Las Vegas a couple of months ago that I got to go to. There's a four-square league. There's all kinds of childhood play and toys. Saul Gonzalez>> The games of the playground that adults are playing. Christopher Noxon>> Have been sort of revived. Sometimes in a real kitschy, ironic way, it's sort of a hoot, but oftentimes with this kind of intensity that's really interesting. Saul Gonzalez>> The most interesting chapter in the book to me was how you traced the evolution of childhood, what we consider childhood. Talk about that. How the concept of what it is to be a child is a relatively modern construct, right? Christopher Noxon>> It is, yeah. I mean, I went back to try to discover the roots of this idea or this impulse and found myself landing again and again back on the same like ten year period which was really fascinating. I mean, the idea of childhood and conversely the idea of adulthood both really took shape around 1900, the last turn of the century. You know, adulthood was this idea that was sort of born out of the necessities of the industrial revolution. It was an idea that was created to make, you know, upstanding, reliable citizens. Saul Gonzalez>> Workers. Christopher Noxon>> Workers. People who could take their place in this new economy. You know, conversely, childhood was kind of discovered as this not only an inspiration to people like James Berry and Lewis Carroll. There was this huge sort of explosion of children's literature. At the same time, there was this commercial discovery that kids could be marketed to the first amusement parks, the first comic books, the first kid's candy, the first kid's toys. All this stuff sort of happened around the same ten or fifteen year period. At the same time, adults found themselves sort of slipping back into that idea of childhood with a lot more frequency. Saul Gonzalez>> Let me channel the voice of adulthood here, traditional American adulthood, which might look at a thirteen year old child playing with his videogame or reading a comic book and say, "That's great. That's an innocent pursuit. That's what that kid should be doing at that age." But if you're thirty-five and you're going to the Star Trek Convention or you're forty and you have a collection of action figures, is there something wrong there? Is that somewhere between goofy and grotesque? Christopher Noxon>> In the book, I call those critics the harrumphing codgers and there's a lot of them out there. I have encountered an amazing amount of just sort of virulent emotional objections. Saul Gonzalez>> Because they have a point. Christopher Noxon>> I think what that's based on mostly is a sort of arbitrary age norm. The idea that somehow, you know, graphic novels innately are more childlike or juvenile than watching television for three hours is kind of silly if you think about it. I mean, on its face, a lot of this stuff like kickball is no less, you know, playful than racquetball and yet we sneer at the people playing kickball and think that racquetball is completely acceptable. Shouldn't we as adults have that ability to kind of slip back in and relax and play and have fun? You know, have some fun (laughter). Saul Gonzalez>> Adults don't have to be locked in to playing Canasta or watching Lawrence Welk or going fishing. Christopher Noxon>> You know, we're so attuned to this idea that we have to constantly improve ourselves and sometimes the way to do that is to let go, you know. It's to kind of get back to that much more open, wondrous, playful place. Saul Gonzalez>> And, Christopher, if you have a nation of adults who increasingly act like kids, what does that mean for the real kids out there? Christopher Noxon>> Well, there is this kind of interesting parallel phenomenon. I'm still not entirely clear how they're linked, but the toy industry talks about something called age compression which is, about ten years ago, they first started realizing that kids who had played with toys and sort of engaged in kid culture up until twelve and thirteen were casting that stuff aside at eight or nine. You know, what's interesting is in that same period -- Saul Gonzalez>> -- I see that in my own son. Christopher Noxon>> Yeah. I mean, kids don't want to be kids as long as they used to. What you're finding now is that, at the same time, adults are going back and filling up that space. I mean, for industry and for corporations, this represents an amazing opportunity because it means that there's all these new markets for things that they thought had sort of expired. Saul Gonzalez>> But for the kids themselves? Christopher Noxon>> What does it mean for kids? I mean, I have three kids myself and I play with them and sort of experience their kid culture. They're still young, so it's a little easier. I'm not at that age where they're rolling their eyes yet (laughter). That time will come. But I do think, you know, playful parents, people who really can connect with their kids on a mutual level and get down on the carpet and mess with those Legos and go see the Pixar movie and really side by side experience, does lead to a sort of enhancement of authority more than it does sort of undercutting it. I mean, there's this tremendous anxiety about are we seeding our roles as role models and are we undercutting our authority or are we being bad parents because we can play with our kids? I think that's based on a fundamental misunderstanding. Kids don't think that play somehow negates you. Kids like you better. Saul Gonzalez>> It doesn't threaten your authority as an adult. Christopher Noxon>> No. They are more receptive. It actually enhances your credibility, I believe. Saul Gonzalez>> Well, Christopher Noxon, author of "Rejuvenile", I want to thank you for the book and I wish you many childhood wonders in your future. Christopher Noxon>> Thank you, and to you as well. Saul Gonzalez>> Thanks very much. Christopher Noxon>> Thanks. Announcer>> 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 Zavala>> They wanted to take the biggest photograph in the world and, for that, they needed the biggest camera in the world, so they made one. Out of what? Roger Cooper went to El Toro Marine Air Base for a look. Roger Cooper>> We're at what used to be El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, soon to be the Great Park, with Jerry Burchfield of the Legacy Project. What's the Legacy Project, Jerry? Jerry Burchfield>> Well, it's an ongoing, or I should say, fifteen year documentation project where six professional artist photographers have come together to create a public legacy of photographs of El Toro Marine Base as it transitions into the Orange County Great Park. Roger Cooper>> Part of that is a big project that you've undertaken and I do mean big, as in stories high. Tell me about the pinhole camera and where it is. Jerry Burchfield>> The pinhole camera is in an aircraft hangar that overlooks the expanse of the runways and the control tower here at El Toro. Roger Cooper>> That scene behind you is what it photographed? Jerry Burchfield>> Exactly. It shows the coastal hills in the background and it provides a reference to what historically was the heart of the base and what ultimately will be the heart of the Orange County Great Park. Roger Cooper>> So you turned a hangar into the biggest box camera that's ever been. Jerry Burchfield>> Pretty much, yeah. We have been photographing here for four years, shot over eighty thousand photographs to document this place, but now that it's on the eve of transitioning into the park, they're going to start tearing up the runways soon. It seemed like it was appropriate to make a big statement and to use the facility here as the means for making that statement. Roger Cooper>> Jerry, take me back to grade school science. How does this pinhole camera work? Jerry Burchfield>> A pinhole camera is the most basic type of camera there is. It has a history that goes back long before photography was invented, several thousand years. What it involves is, you have a dark room and a tiny hole and, if it's light outside, light will come through that tiny hole and end up projected on the opposite wall of that interior building and you'll see everything that's outside the camera obscura. That means dark room and that's literally what we created. We made this aircraft hangar into a gigantic darkroom. It took weeks to make it light-tight and there was only one opening that provided the image. It's a pinhole -- well, it's a little bigger than a pinhole, but it's less than a quarter inch in diameter and it allowed us to get enough light to project an image on a piece of sensitized fabric that's thirty-two feet high and a hundred eleven feet long. Roger Cooper>> You originally thought this exposure was going to take days. Jerry Burchfield>> Initially, all indications were that this exposure could take anywhere from five to fourteen days. Nothing had been done on this scale before, so nobody really knew what to expect. We're using a hand-coated black and white emulsion that has never been used under these conditions before, so we had to do a lot of testing and the testing ended up indicating that we only needed an exposure of thirty-five minutes. Roger Cooper>> What happens if there's an earthquake during the exposure? You get a blurred shot? Jerry Burchfield>> We'd get a blurred shot (laughter), exactly. This is a one-shot deal. Months of effort, a lot of money and time and energy went into making it. Tons of people worked on this helping make it a reality and, if any variable along the way got screwed up, the whole thing was shot, was lost. But fortunately, it came out. Roger Cooper>> Now you don't just trot this negative down to the drugstore and drop it off for processing, do you? Jerry Burchfield>> No. We had to process it here and the processing was a major thing in itself. We made a giant tray that was thirty-five feet wide and a hundred fifteen feet long. We used eighteen hundred gallons of black and white photographic chemistry. We had about sixty people helping. Yeah, it was far from traditional printing. One thing about the piece that's worth noting is that it shows the hand-work, the hand application. We had to hand-coat the emulsion the way the early photographers did. We had to process it in a very sort of limited primitive way because of the scale of it. What resulted is a picture that looks less detailed maybe than a normal photograph, but has a beautiful sort of hand-work quality to it. It has a feeling sort of like an impressionistic painting and it references, again, the history of this medium, the history of optics, the history of vision machines and the history of this part of Orange County. Roger Cooper>> The Legacy Project has people who have put in some hard work. Who did this? Jerry Burchfield>> Well, there are six of us. Myself, Mark Chamberlain, Jacques Garnier, Douglas McCulloh, Robert Johnson and Clayton Spada. We're all photographic artists who have known each other for years, so we formed the Legacy Project and that led us to the great picture. Roger Cooper>> The great picture may make a great mark in the Guinness book? Jerry Burchfield>> That's true. There are two Guinness book categories that are being created for this project. One is the world's largest camera and the other is the world's largest photograph. We have no competition in either of those categories (laughter) because nothing has ever been done on this scale before. Roger Cooper>> What was your feeling at that moment when the chemicals did their magic and you began to see image? What was that like? Jerry Burchfield>> Relief. I have to say relief because there were so many variables here. So many things could have gone wrong. We're very pleased and very happy with the results. Roger Cooper>> This is just the latest and the greatest of the photos you've taken out here. The Legacy Project sort of captured what this place was. This was the jumping off place in World War II for many, many military people, some of whom didn't come back to this place. Jerry Burchfield>> World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm. The place has a great history. It definitely is a ghost town and it's amazing that, in such a short time, nature could come back and start to tear apart the concrete runways and show its presence, show it's ultimate dominance. When we first came here to photograph, one of the things that struck us was a sense of presence and absence, how even though the military was no longer here, we definitely had the feeling of the ghosts of El Toro being present, being a part of every picture we took. Roger Cooper>> Well, Jerry Burchfield, with the Legacy Project, this has to be the biggest photograph I've ever seen and it's not out of focus and it is not over-exposed. Congratulations. Jerry Burchfield>> Thank you. Thank you very much. Roger Cooper>> Nice work. Val Zavala>> As you know, El Toro Marine Air Base is now closed, so I guess you could call that the biggest disposable camera in the world. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Announcer>> 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. Sponsored in part by:  | |
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