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Life & Times Transcript

09/14/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

It takes a lot more than heavy equipment to build a great concert hall. What's the key to success for Segerstrom Hall?

Henry Segerstrom>> We chose the acoustician really before we chose the architect because we wanted to create a musical instrument.

Jeanne Skroki>> Oh, my goodness. This is definitely a dream come true.

Val Zavala>> And then, will a notorious murder case make a good movie? Find out if our critics are enthralled by "The Black Dahlia".

These stories and more next 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>> It seems to be the season for world-class concert halls. In Philadelphia, Nashville, Miami, Toronto, multi-million dollar music venues are opening. Well, now it's Orange County's turn to step into the spotlight with the opening of the two thousand seat, two hundred million dollar Segerstrom Concert Hall. It will be home to the Pacific Symphony Orchestra. But after all the glamorous galas are over, it's the sound that matters. Orange County reporter, Roger Cooper, met the man in charge of acoustics.

Announcer>> "Maestro Carl St. Clair, along with his virtuoso Caterpillar performers."

Roger Cooper>> It's been more than three years since the Orange County Performing Arts Center broke ground on its new concert hall. That night, heavy equipment operators in tuxedos directed by the conductor of the Pacific Symphony danced in the spotlight. On what had once been a Costa Mesa bean field, a world-class two hundred million dollar hall for great music began to rise.

In the drawings that architects like to turn out, we were told it would look like this. This time lapse condenses three years of work into twenty-four seconds.

[Film Clip]

Roger Cooper>> Halfway through construction, Segerstrom Hall looked like this and now, as it prepares to open for its first concert, the renderings have become real. Designed by Cesar Pelli, the entrance is a massive wall of waving glass. The lobby leads upward to a spiral staircase and a spiral chandelier of lights that hang from three hundred lines. Then you stand before it, the great hall itself. The new home for the Pacific Symphony soars eighty-three feet with seating for two thousand.

But like a beautiful opera singer, a concert hall gets judged not on its looks, but its sound. And that enormous responsibility fell to a New Yorker. He's been living in Orange County the past few weeks and listening. He does a lot of listening.

Damian Doria>> It's been about eight years from the first time that they contacted us about programming the hall and starting to budget what their cost would be.

Roger Cooper>> Damian Doria is an acoustician, one of the two principal acoustic consultants on the project. Henry Segerstrom who has donated fifty million dollars to make the hall possible believes acoustics come first.

Henry Segerstrom>> We chose the acousticians really before we chose the architect because we wanted to create a musical instrument.

Roger Cooper>> And like a violin, this concert hall is tunable, which is what Doria is doing. Unlike Disney Hall in Los Angeles, the acoustics in Segerstrom Hall are adjustable.

[Film Clip]

Roger Cooper>> How do you tune a concert hall? There are three different ways. The first is by raising or lowering sections of the acoustic canap� that hangs over the orchestra. Second, strategically located velour drapes around the hall can be moved into place to absorb sound. And finally, you can adjust the doors to these stretchers with the glowing blue interior. These are giant reverberation chambers that run from floor to ceiling in the hall. By opening and shutting their doors, Doria can set things like the music's decay, the time it takes notes to die away.

Damian Doria>> You can have a reverberant sound like a symphony orchestra would normally have in a concert hall. We can also open the doors fully and extend all the fabric and make the hall much better suited to amplified work.

Roger Cooper>> Symphony violinist, Jeanne Skrocki, likes what she hears.

Jeanne Skrocki>> Oh, my goodness. This is definitely a dream come true. I think for any musician, any fine musician, the sound in this hall allows us to really produce what it is that we've been training our whole lives to do. It's very exciting to hear a true sound of what it is that we're producing on stage.

Roger Cooper>> And Performing Arts Center president, Terrence Dwyer, says so far, so good.

Terrence Dwyer>> We've already had some rehearsals in the hall. It looks beautiful, it sounds extraordinary. The artists of the Pacific Symphony Orchestra are just over the moon with excitement about how great it sounds and how thrilled they are about their future.

Roger Cooper>> Doria decides what to adjust by listening to the orchestra in rehearsal and consulting with Maestro St. Clair. He also gets feedback from William Bolcom. Bolcom composed the song cycle that Placido Domingo will sing in a world premier on opening night.

Damian Doria>> It was obvious from the start that the room had a very good presence, that we had a very good string sound. A lot of warmth and strength in the strings which was one of the things the PSO was very concerned about. We also have a very good woodwind sound and good balance between the different sections.

Roger Cooper>> Jeanne can tell when Doria changes the canap�.

Jeanne Skrocki>> Definitely. It's very easy for us to tell on stage when he changes it. In fact, we can tell even when he changes. There are three partitions at the top that are movable and we can tell when he moves each one. There's a little difference of sound, either the balance within the orchestra or the sound of the entire orchestra that goes out into the hall.

Roger Cooper>> The attention to detail even extends to the air conditioning. Vents are placed at the base of the seats to reduce noise.

Damian Doria>> That's a little unusual for North America and other parts of the world, particularly Europe. It's very common for air to come from below the seats and rise. In North America, we very often had top-down systems where air is put into the room at the top and then drawn down through the room, so you're using a lot more energy and you're also making it a lot noisier.

Roger Cooper>> And the walls of the building are also designed to keep outside noise outside.

Damian Doria>> The building itself is very heavy for sound isolation. We have aircraft that fly over from Santa Ana Airport and John Wayne Airport. There's also the potential for sirens or loud vehicles outside, so we have to protect the hall from those types of intrusive noises.

Roger Cooper>> The Center's president says all this effort will be worth it.

Terrence Dwyer>> This is a building where I expect exciting things to happen. I expect to experience creativity. I expect to experience innovation and to be challenged and inspired by the art on the stage.

[Film Clip]

Roger Cooper>> Rehearsals this week take on a special urgency. Musicians know that an eager audience will fall silent waiting to hear the very first notes in this world-class concert hall.

[Film Clip]

Roger Cooper>> The debut of the Segerstrom Concert Hall marks a cultural milestone for Orange County. It joins other major cities that have built impressive new homes for their orchestras. Patrons are convinced that the investment they've made is a sound one, a beautiful sound. In Costa Mesa, I'm Roger Cooper for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> For more information on the opening concerts at the Segerstrom Concert Hall, you can go to the website ocpac.org. That stands for Orange County Performing Arts Center.

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>> Admit it. All of us at one time or another in the back of our minds have had that politically incorrect question we would love to ask about an ethnic group and, in southern California, that often means about Mexicans. Well, now there's a person who has the brains and the guts to answer anything.

He lives and works in Santa Ana, or Santana, as he calls it, population three hundred forty thousand and a whopping seventy-six percent are Latino. But not one of them is like Gustavo Arellano.

Gustavo Arellano>> "We're trying to make ourselves so spic and span and, all of a sudden, here comes this young loud-mouth."

Val Zavala>> Gustavo is a reporter for the O.C. Weekly. He writes a column called "Ask a Mexican". Yes, he's the Mexican and there's no question he won't answer, like "Why do Mexicans paint their houses such bright colors?" "Why do they throw their toilet paper in the wastebasket?" And "Why do they display the Virgin of Guadalupe everywhere?"

On his way to work, Gustavo passes an immigration office, a bit ironic, considering his father crossed the border illegally in the trunk of a car, a bit of personal history he doesn't hesitate to tell.

Gustavo Arellano>> My great-grandfather actually came here to pick in the orange groves, but he would always go back to Mexico. He was always back and forth. My father was an illegal immigrant who came here in the trunk of a Chevy. But with my parents --

Val Zavala>> -- a Chevy.

Gustavo Arellano>> A Chevy. That's actually an "Ask a Mexican" question. "Why does a Mexican pronounce shower as chower, but chicken as shicken?"

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> The questions he gets range from the sincerely interested to the racist to the absurd.

Gustavo Arellano>> Like "What's the Mexican obsession with midgets?"

Val Zavala>> Mexicans are obsessed with midgets?

Gustavo Arellano>> Absolutely. We love midgets.

Val Zavala>> I didn't know that. You mean on Mexican television?

Gustavo Arellano>> Yeah. You see Mexican television or Mexican films and you always have these small little midget men running around chasing after big-bosomed women. Who doesn't love them?

Val Zavala>> What is with that?

Gustavo Arellano>> I read that question and I started laughing. I said, all right, it's an easy question and the easy answer is for me to say that everyone loves midgets. But then, I did my research and it turned out that the Aztecs considered midgets to be holy people, that they were children of God and that they held up the sky. Irony of ironies, they held up the sky. So much of our psyche comes from conquests and Aztecs and all that. That must have been one of the things that trickled down, our obsession with midgets.

Val Zavala>> Gustavo graduated from Chapman University and has a Masters in Latin American studies from UCLA. You can hear the academic side emerge in his answers, though not for long.

Gustavo Arellano>> There was one of "Why do Mexicans have so many babies?" That's always a classic one. So I would say, okay, if we want a theological response, the Catholic Church is opposed to contraception, so maybe many Mexicans don't use contraception. The anthropological response is that, when you have poor societies, poor societies tend to have large families so they can have more wage earners.

But I said that the real reason is because there is no prophylactic in the world that could hold back the Mexican spermatozoa. They just go through the condoms and, you know, nothing could really stop them.

Val Zavala>> Gustavo is also the food editor and an investigative reporter for the O.C. Weekly, all without any formal journalism training. How did that happen?

Will Swaim>> He was a film studies major, I think, at Chapman University and he was a senior then. He wrote us this wonderfully sardonic letter to the editor and I thought this is a guy who has a lot of potential as a writer. He was sort of disrespectful of authority and I thought perfect for a weekly.

Val Zavala>> Will Swaim is the O.C. Weekly's editor. So how did this come about, "Ask a Mexican"?

Will Swaim>> Well, I think the real trajectory of the column began with me driving up Seventeenth Street and seeing a sign in Spanish that I completely could not translate. I thought, you know, I got to ask Gustavo what that means. It's got to be some sort of play on words. It's about a guy on a radio show or something.

Val Zavala>> Yeah, a radio DJ, yeah.

Will Swaim>> Right. I asked Gustavo, you ought to write a column at least once to just sort of explain something to a complete ignoramus Gringo. He said, oh, we don't even call them Gringos. I said, well, there's column two. So he did this thing as a joke the first time and he's brilliant. As soon as he wrote the first one, people didn't take it as a joke. They took it quite seriously and he was suddenly like the Miss Manners of all things Mexican.

Val Zavala>> Well, I don't know if you'd say Miss Manners, considering his biggest influences are The Simpsons and Howard Stern. But his outspoken expertise on Mexican culture is certainly propelling him into the national -- actually international -- spotlight.

Gustavo Arellano>> "I think I told you that the largest news weekly or news magazine in the Netherlands is doing a profile on me too. I'm doing that. I'm doing a television show tomorrow in the morning and I'm going to do another radio show for NPR as well. Not day to day, but . . ."

Val Zavala>> One of the most common questions is "What ever happened to the lazy Mexican?" That's an easy one for Gustavo.

Gustavo Arellano>> And my response is "Really? Mexicans are lazy? You know, go over to a street corner and you have all these fifty men trying to get a job pulling weeds for five dollars a day. That's lazy?"

One of the great questions was "Why do Mexicans sell oranges on the side of freeways?" I say, "Well, what do you want them to sell? Steinway pianos?" They know it's something that you can sell easily, you can transport easily and you can make pretty good profits off of it. Five thousand dollars a year and you don't have to report it to INS.

Val Zavala>> Okay, he meant the IRS, an understandable slip. Gustavo is always in high gear. Today he'll put in fourteen hours. He's got a regular radio appearance tonight on KABC.

Al Rantel>> "There it is, music to walk out by."

Gustavo Arellano>> "We need happy music right now."

Al Rantel>> "Or protest by."

Gustavo Arellano>> "Everyone feels bad. All of America is sad, so I reward all of you with happy music."

Al Rantel>> "Yes, Gustavo Arellano, the author of "Ask a Mexican" in The Orange County Weekly, and he's become now a national figure. You'll be the most famous Mexican before long in all of America."

Gustavo Arellano>> "More famous than the Frito Bandito?"

Al Rantel>> "Well, maybe not quite that famous."

Val Zavala>> This was the week when half a million Latinos marched in Los Angeles for immigrants' rights. There was plenty to talk about.

Caller>> "I see these people willingly flaunting the law, rubbing it in my face."

Gustavo Arellano>> "How do they rub it in your face?"

Caller>> "Well, I think the flag exhibition and the fact that --"

Gustavo Arellano>> -- "So if they waved the American flag, then that would be okay?"

Al Rantel>> "Well, it would be better.

Caller>> "Let 'em be American."

Al Rantel>> "If I wanted to be American, I'd be waving the American flag and saying this is the country I love, I want to stay here, I want to work here and I want to raise my family here."

Gustavo Arellano>> "I'm sure since you saw the demonstration, you saw a lot of these immigrants waving American flags."

Al Rantel>> "I didn't see that."

Gustavo Arellano>> "Oh, really?"

Al Rantel>> "Oh, you did? Well, I'll take your word for it."

Gustavo Arellano>> "So, go ahead, caller?"

Caller>> "Well, there was a few burning American flags."

Gustavo Arellano>> "Yeah, those people are idiots and, frankly, they shouldn't be here."

Val Zavala>> Gustavo has been answering questions like these ever since his column started back in November 2004.

Gustavo Arellano>> There is always going to be questions about Mexicans. Again, Mexicans have been the obsession of Americans for a hundred fifty years. If I never received another question ever again, I have enough material to last me at least five years.

Val Zavala>> What do your folks think of this column that you have?

Gustavo Arellano>> (Laughter) My mom always reads it and she says, "You know, Gustavo, maybe you don't want to say some of these things because people get offended by the truth." So my parents, the most Mexican people that I know, love the column. They like the fact that I do discuss some things.

Val Zavala>> But they're a little concerned, it sounds like.

Gustavo Arellano>> Well, they're concerned because they have that traditional Catholic propriety and shame and think, oh, you can't cuss on the air or you can't cuss in print. You can't talk about Mexicans hating Black people or Mexicans hating gay people. You can't talk about that. But at the same time that you're talking about it, you're right, it's true.

The big fear with Mexicans is that somehow we're the exception to the melting pot. We're the society that just won't marinate, that won't dissolve into the stew, to use all these clich�s. But give me a break. Assimilation is inevitable in this country and I always tell people don't worry about it. You know, we're going to be as American as everyone else, if not more so, and we're also going to hate Mexicans like you do.

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.

Larry Mantle>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC. Our first film this week is set right here in Los Angeles. "The Black Dahlia" is directed by Brian De Palma and it's adapted from the best-selling James Ellroy novel of some years ago. The film stars Josh Hartnett, Aaron Eckhart, Scarlett Johansson and Hilary Swank.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> I'm joined by critics Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com and Lael Loewenstein of Variety. Henry, what did you think of this film adaptation of "The Black Dahlia"?

Henry Sheehan>> Very disappointing, you know, this new adaptation of a James Ellroy novel. Ellroy's book was the basis of "L.A. Confidential", a great film about old Los Angeles crime. This is based on a famous murder in 1947. A woman, a would-be actress, found sawed in half in a field.

But the film just doesn't come together. Really bad acting from Josh Hartnett as a young detective who gets involved with the case and also with his partner played by Aaron Eckhart and his girlfriend played by Scarlett Johansson, also a really terrible performance.

But the film never comes together. Director Brian De Palma really seems to approach it as an exercise in style along with his cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, and he doesn't really pay any attention to the dramatic tension inherent in this material. It's a surprisingly slack story, given the import the crime has had in the history of Los Angeles.

Larry Mantle>> What did you think, Lael?

Lael Loewenstein>> I agree with Henry. This is a highly convoluted, visually stunning and visually arresting, but dramatically under-whelming story that, given the pedigree of the people involved, should have been so much better. When you think about Vilmos Zsigmond, certainly he does a nice job and the cinematographer, Dante Ferretti, does a beautiful job with the production design.

But Brian De Palma, I've had this problem with so many of his films. They just feel like they're trying to be better than they are. They're like a facsimile. He's been a facsimile of Hitchcock. He's been a facsimile of so many other things with the exception of, I think, "The Untouchables" and possibly "Scarface". So many of his films feel like they just want to be something else, but it just ends up being very disappointing, very convoluted and really kind of inscrutable.

Larry Mantle>> Our second film this week is "The Last Kiss". It features an ensemble cast headed by Zack Braff. The film is directed by Tony Goldwyn and the screenplay was written by Paul Haggis who wrote and directed "Crash" and wrote the screenplay for "Million Dollar Baby".

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Lael, what did you think of "The Last Kiss"?

Lael Loewenstein>> Well, I expected a little bit more. I liked the Zack Braff comedy "Garden State" which he wrote and directed. He didn't write or direct this one, but he is the central character. It's a relationship movie that, to me, ends up feeling like a very ugly kind of indictment of what men and women do wrong. It's also a very, very misogynistic film in which the women are either shrews or sirens.

Every character in this film is having some sort of dysfunctional relationship. Everybody is breaking down. There's a few good performances. Tom Wilkinson and Blythe Danner are always great as the parents in the film, but it just feels very, very disappointing and very kind of mean-spirited.

Larry Mantle>> What did you think, Henry?

Henry Sheehan>> Well, talk about misogynistic. I mean, this is one of the most sexist films I've seen in years. You know, the men are defined independently. They have jobs, they have friends. The women only live for their men. They're completely dependent on them. All they are are completely emotional about those relationships.

Tony Goldwyn's direction is some of the worst I've ever seen in a feature film. All we have are matching close-ups. He really directed it as if it was bad television, unimaginative television, yet it's presented to us as a feature film. Just a terrible enterprise from start to finish.

Larry Mantle>> We have two documentaries to talk about this week. The first is "The Ground Truth" which tells the story of American soldiers who've been traumatized by their experiences in Iraq.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Henry, what did you think of this documentary, "The Ground Truth"?

Henry Sheehan>> Well, I thought this was a good film. I think we have to look at documentaries about Iraq in a larger picture because what we get from television and newspapers is kind of that day's events. But now we have a series of documentaries that are helping to expand our view by going deep into individual subjects.

This film by Patricia Foulkrod is about returning veterans who are having trouble re-assimilating into society largely because they suffer from post traumatic stress disorder either because of the horrors that they were forced to perform or undergo in Iraq. There is some stuff about killing civilians by mistake or they've lost a limb or just that they're upset.

One of the stunning revelations in the film is, if you tell the Army that you're suffering PTSD, you have to stay in Iraq for treatment and all these people are desperate to get out of Iraq. This is a film well worth seeing. It tells us about returning veterans, something we haven't seen a lot of.

Larry Mantle>> And finally this week, we take a look back at the life of musician and social activist, John Lennon. The documentary is titled "The U.S. vs. John Lennon".

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> "U.S. vs. John Lennon", Lael?

Lael Loewenstein>> Well, this is a fascinating documentary that does a really great job of recontextualizing John Lennon's role not just as a musician, but as a peace activist. So many of today's young people probably only think of him as the former Beatle who was shot. But really he was, of course, known as a great peace activist and he came very, very close to being deported in the early 1970s with his wife, Yoko Ono.

The film relies on a number of really interesting interviews with everyone from G. Gordon Liddy to Carl Bernstein to Ron Kovic to, of course, Yoko Ono herself whose cooperation in the film allowed it to have such amazing access to John Lennon himself.

You see footage of the famous sit-in. You see footage of Lennon performing. You see a lot of interviews from shows like Dick Cavett and Mike Douglas where Lennon himself is talking about why peace is so important to him. This film does a really great job of bringing that John Lennon into the fore. It's perhaps a little bit sanctimonious, but it's still a very good film.

Larry Mantle>> Thanks for joining us for another FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC joined by critics Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com and Lael Loewenstein of Variety. Please join us again next week for the next edition of FilmWeek on Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> KPCC public radio broadcasts the hour version of FilmWeek Friday mornings at eleven. 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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