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Life & Times Transcript
4/27/07 Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times -- The long-awaited Expo line is finally on track from the city to the sea, but the final leg has hit a rough stretch. Karen Leonard>> I was appalled to see that it was mostly people opposed and that they very adamantly opposed and unwilling to even listen or wait for the facts to come out. Nancy Kattler>> I am pro light rail, but I am also pro light rail five blocks south on Venice. Val Zavala>> And then, too much creativity can turn into chaos. How top graphic artists cut through the clutter. 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>> It's been a vision of Los Angeles leaders for decades, a fast form of mass transit from downtown to the ocean. Well, now plans are underway to do just that, but they're hitting a roadblock, citizens who don't want light rail going through their neighborhood. Sound familiar? Toni Guinyard goes to an affluent community on the west side who wants to reroute the Expo line. Toni Guinyard>> Plans for building a light rail system on the west side of Los Angeles will eventually impact everyone, especially those who drive to, from or live there. The project has become an all-consuming, frustrating and often contentious debate among people calling west side communities their homes. >> "We're encouraging them to look at these impacts and concerns of the community." Toni Guinyard>> These discussions center around plans for the Exposition Corridor Transit Project, Phase 2, the second part of a planned light rail line from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica, the city to the sea. Darrell Clarke>> I am so looking forward to this becoming what it should be. Toni Guinyard>> Think of Darrell Clarke as a self-taught, unofficial expert on the issue of light rail. After eighteen years volunteering with the group, Friends for Expo Transit, Clarke is a familiar voice in the call for support of this project. Darrell Clarke>> The first half of downtown to Culver City is under construction this year. They say it will open by 2010. They're now planning the second half from Culver City the rest of the way to Santa Monica. Toni Guinyard>> And that's the sticking point? Darrell Clarke>> That's the sticking point and it's really important because that's what will get all the people who are clogging the Santa Monica Freeway to the jobs on the west side in west Los Angeles and Santa Monica. Toni Guinyard>> The fourteen hundred home community of Cheviot Hills, a neighborhood nestled between Century City and the 10 Freeway, has become ground zero. Community meetings are being held to address the sticking points. Where should rail stations be placed? Are over or underpasses needed? What about safety and what about the noise? But most of all, where should the second phase of the rail line go? Two primary alignments are being considered. One would follow Venice Boulevard to Sepulveda and extend approximately 7.8 miles. [Film Clip] Toni Guinyard>> The other would follow the Exposition right-of-way already owned by the MTA. That route would run 6.9 miles and border the community of Cheviot Hills, a route a network of homeowners associations have voted to oppose. >> "Because I'm an advocate of alternatives." >> "Are you wanting this to go down through the neighborhoods?" >> "No, no." Benjamin Cate>> Even the people who live in Cheviot Hills are going to take this bloody train? No. They're going to get in their cars. >> "Well, one thing, it goes right past the schools." >> "The school is right next to an extremely wide, very fast roads Overland Avenue. That's more dangerous to children than that light rail could ever be." Toni Guinyard>> Residents are being asked to submit written comments, including options not yet considered, rather than make a public presentation. >> "Traffic jams, traffic overflow." Richard Thorpe>> We wind up getting a lot more meaningful input rather than having certain groups dominate a discussion in an open public meeting. We wind up getting a lot more feedback from a more diverse community group that way. Toni Guinyard>> Including Friends for Expo Transit -- [Film Clip] Toni Guinyard>> -- to supporters of the Venice-Sepulveda route. James Greenwood>> I think it's more a question of the best use of the tax dollars and putting the stops and the tracks where it will be the most convenient for the most people. Toni Guinyard>> And then you have another group that believes the Exposition right-of-way alignment is the better of the two options. After all, these railroad tracks have been here for years and have a place in the city's history. The tracks were originally built in 1875 for a steam railroad stretching from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica. >> Then it was electrified when all the trolley car lines went in, the Big Red cars. >> So the line has been here and was here long before the houses were. Toni Guinyard>> Karen Leonard and Sarah Hayes are co-chairs of the group, Light Rail for Cheviot. It was formed after they attended a homeowners association light rail committee meeting. Karen Leonard>> And I was appalled to see that it was mostly people opposed and that they were very adamantly opposed and unwilling to even listen or wait for the facts to come out. Toni Guinyard>> They took us on a walk along the stretch of the winding Exposition right-of-way just below Cheviot Hills. Karen Leonard>> The fewer at-grade crossings will be involved and it will be the cheapest because MTA already owns this. Sarah Hayes>> All of the houses along here were built -- most of them were built when there was a freight train and Red Car lines going through here, so it does seem a little odd that people would now say that we can't use it for rail. Karen Leonard>> Well, what we're trying to do is work for mitigations that will make the line acceptable and welcome to our neighbors. We want an underpass at Overland. We want sound walls where they will be necessary. We want really safe conditions around Overland School. These things we think we can get better if we worked with the construction authority rather than totally opposing the entire idea of the line. Sarah Hayes>> This is here. It's wide and it's open and empty and the light rail could go right through here without impacting the traffic on the city streets. Toni Guinyard>> Alleviating traffic is what both sides in this Expo alignment debate want. They feel trapped in their neighborhoods by gridlock, but the war of words pitting neighbor against neighbor has had no resolution for more than two decades. Karen Leonard>> But in twenty years -- they started their fight twenty years ago. There has been turnover. There are new people in the area. There are new people in the neighborhood and we want to be part of a big city. Toni Guinyard>> It's Leonard's belief that running the Expo rail here -- Karen Leonard>> The right-of-way runs along the southern edge, the southwestern edge of Cheviot Hills. Toni Guinyard>> -- will link the community with the rest of the city. Nancy Kattler>> If they talk about that it makes sense to run it where the trains used to be, but that's not where the riders are. Toni Guinyard>> Nancy Kattler is a long-time Cheviot Hills resident and homeowners association member. Nancy Kattler>> I am pro light rail. Don't get me wrong, Toni. I am pro light rail, but I am also pro light rail five blocks south on Venice. I think our city will die if it doesn't have light rail, but put the light rail where your ridership is, not through sleepy residential communities. What once was good isn't good now. Toni Guinyard>> Kattler has lived in this neighborhood since 1968 and remembers when the trains ran through. Nancy Kattler>> I mean, the train ran. It was trolley then. You're talking like horse and buggy to jets. I mean, there is no comparison, no comparison. Toni Guinyard>> But comparisons are being made and viewpoints are being expressed over a plan to resolve a traffic problem that has been bad and is only getting worse. Darrell Clarke>> We have over eight hundred thousand people within two miles of this line. We have all of these jobs and the worst traffic congestion anywhere. All you got to do is read the paper and people are just saying, you know, this is horrible. We built the transit-oriented development before we had the transit, the jobs, the high-density housing. Now we're trying to play catch-up to bring the transit in. Toni Guinyard>> And because of that, everyone is paying the price. I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times. Val Zavala>> So what do you think about the Expo line? You can post your opinion on our blog. Just go to kcet.org and click on the Life and Times Blog. 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>> It's a chapter of civil rights history you seldom find in books. A Mexican American family here in southern California challenged desegregation in our schools and won. Now the Mendez family is being honored with a U.S. stamp and their contribution is getting the attention it deserves. Hena Cuevas has their remarkable story. Silvia Mendez>> They didn't care how it looked. It was just a building there for the Mexicans to go to. Hena Cuevas>> The year was 1944. Silvia Mendez was only seven years old, but old enough to remember how difficult it was for her and her two younger brothers to go to a school in their own neighborhood. Silvia Mendez>> It was all dirt and then the flies would come from the dairy that was right next to the Mexican school. Hena Cuevas>> It's been half a century since segregation was declared unconstitutional, but Silvia Mendez still can't forget her first taste of discrimination. Her aunt Soledad was taking Silvia and her two brothers to register them in the Seventeenth Street School in Westminster. Also with them were their cousins, two girls who had distinctly lighter skin and hair. Silvia Mendez>> So they said your children can stay in the school, but your brother's children will have to go to the Mexican school and she got really upset. She said, "I'm not leaving my children here if you won't take my brother's children." So she gathered us all up and took us home. Hena Cuevas>> When Silvia's father, Gonzalo Mendez, heard what had happened, he went to the see the principal, then the superintendent. Both said they could do nothing. Rules were rules. Gonzalo then went to the Westminster School Board. Silvia Mendez>> They told Mr. Mendez that there's nothing we can do. Certain cities here in Orange County have decided to segregate the Mexicans and they have to go to Mexican school and we cannot interfere with what they're doing. Hena Cuevas>> The official justification for segregation was in a document from the school district that said "Mexican children have a higher percentage of contagious diseases, have problems learning and have lower moral values." Facing a dead end, Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez decided to take on something even larger, the law. The family owned a restaurant and some property and tapped into their own savings to file a lawsuit against the school district. Silvia Mendez didn't realize how determined her parents were. Silvia Mendez>> At the time, I was not aware of the extent to what they were doing. I knew they were -- because we would go to court every day, so we knew they were fighting. Hena Cuevas>> The court battle took several lawsuits and lasted for two years. Finally in 1947, the San Francisco Court of Appeals in a unanimous decision ruled that segregated schools in California violated the state's constitution. The Mendez family had won a major civil rights battle ten years before the United States Supreme Court ruled against segregation on a national scale. Frederick Aguirre>> So that is the first time in the history of this country that a public school had been told that separate facilities, even though they were "equal", were not equal. Hena Cuevas>> Orange County Judge, Frederick Aguirre, has studied the Mendez case extensively. Frederick Aguirre>> It's been culturally easier for the media to assume and promote that there was only a black and white issue, but obviously Mexican Americans have been a part of that civil rights struggle. Hena Cuevas>> He says Mendez didn't have an impact nationally because it never reached to the United States Supreme Court. However, for the Mendez children, the change was immediate. Silvia Mendez>> They put certain grades in the Mexican school and put certain grades in the white school, so they integrated us that way. Hena Cuevas>> What was the reaction from the parents and the children at the white school? Silvia Mendez>> The parents were very upset that they had to go to that dilapidated school in the middle of the Barrio, so they started verbally protesting to the school board and eventually they just got rid of that school. Hena Cuevas>> In the late 1940's, racial tensions were high in Orange County. In the meantime, the Mendez family had moved to Santa Ana. Even there at the new school, the children say they still weren't welcome. Gonzalo Mendez>> We were the only three Mexicans in the whole school. Hena Cuevas>> Gonzalo Mendez was six years old at the time. Gonzalo Mendez>> Oh, yeah. I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to be there at all. I didn't like it for the obvious reason. They didn't want us there, so where you're not wanted, you don't really want to be there. Hena Cuevas>> Their younger brother, Geronimo, was only five, but he remembers the insults. Geronimo Mendez>> They called us names. Spics, wetbacks, dirty Mexicans. Hena Cuevas>> And even though you were young, you knew what those words meant? Geronimo Mendez>> Yeah, so I would fight back. I didn't want to be there. They didn't want me there. I remember my father having a fit because I didn't want to go. I wouldn't go. I said, "I'm not going, I'm not going." My father said, "I went to all this trouble and you are going (laughter). After all this we went through, you are going." I'd say, "No, I'm not." He'd say, "Yes, you are." Well, you know who won (laughter). Hena Cuevas>> They laugh about it now, but the Mendez children are deeply grateful for the opportunities their parents' determination afforded them. Almost fifty years later, Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez were finally honored with this school that carries their names. It's an honor that, according to their children, would have gone against a decision their parents made never to talk about the case after they won. Why do you think your parents never talked about the case? Silvia Mendez>> Once they won and we were all going to integrated schools and that's what they had fought for, they were just happy that we were all in school. Hena Cuevas>> In 1954, Brown vs. Board outlawed segregated schools in all fifty states, but Judge Aguirre argues that it was the Mendez case that had the biggest influence over Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren. Warren had been the governor of California during the Mendez lawsuit. Frederick Aguirre>> When he went up to the Supreme Court, he already understood the legal basis for dealing with segregated public schools. So when you look at Brown, you can't look at it in an isolated sense. You have to look at what preceded it. Hena Cuevas>> Another Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, also had ties to the Mendez case. He was one of the attorneys for the NAACP who wrote briefs supporting the Mendez family. Now the Mendez siblings want to make sure their case gets the place it deserves in civil rights history. They're getting some help from a new documentary, "Mendez vs. Westminster: For All The Children", produced by Sandra Robbie. And Silvia Mendez takes her story directly to the children who are attending schools that would have been closed to her sixty years ago. Silvia Mendez>> We want it to be taught in schools and we're hoping that someday it will be in the California curriculum. Hena Cuevas>> She says she always gets the same reaction from the kids. Silvia Mendez>> "Oh, we never knew about that." "Why don't we know about this, especially the Latinos?" "Oh, we're so thankful that you have told us this. It has inspired us so much." So with that, I feel that it must go on. Val Zavala>> To spread the word about the Mendez case, a documentary filmmaker has renovated a VW bus and will be bringing the Mendez story to school kids and college students across the country. 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>> Los Angeles artists are on the cutting edge of design and they're part of a massive creative economy, as it's called, that generates a hundred forty billion dollars in sales across greater Los Angeles. But all that creativity can also create clutter like along this stretch of Sunset Boulevard. [Film Clip] Val Zavala>> Drive down Sunset Boulevard through West Hollywood and you find yourself in a jungle of advertising. Some people find this stimulating and exciting, but others consider it an assault on the senses. Ironically, there's not a graphic artist in the world who wouldn't want to escape the crowded landscape that their own industry has created, so how do graphic artists cut through the clutter? For some insight into the world of graphic design, I went to the firm of Adams-Morioka on Wilshire Boulevard. Sean Adams>> Our landscape, which is sort of like popular culture volume turned up to ten. Val Zavala>> Sean Adams and Noreen Morioka are both CalArts graduates who started their own firm in 1994. Their clients include Old Navy and The Gap, Nickelodeon and Disney, Sundance and MTV. Both have been named Fellows this year by the American Institute of Graphic Arts and their company's work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I asked them how they approach our media-saturated society. Noreen Morioka>> I think you're right. There's too much that's out there, but in the end, this is how designers can become successful. It's like I used to work at Baskin-Robbins, right? Sean Adams>> That's the secret (laughter). Noreen Morioka>> No, that's not the secret. But the joke about that is -- thanks, mister -- the joke about that is that of all the flavors that were in the Baskin-Robbins, which were over thirty-two flavors, Vanilla was number one. French Vanilla was probably number two. The reason was that people were just so annoyed at the fact that there was a Caramel Swirl and da-da-da-da and they just wanted to eat ice cream, right? So I think the same thing is true about what's happening in the messaging. People nowadays don't want to see eye candy and crazy shadows on things. They just want a message. They want to know if they should stop or they should go. Val Zavala>> But keeping it simple is not a simple process. Take, for example, the Sundance project. Noreen Morioka>> Robert Redford actually came and said, "I have all these different entities and they all look different and I think they all act different and I think, rather than working as a family toward a mission, they are unbeknown to themselves and hurting the mission. They're all fighting against each other." Val Zavala>> So they talked for hours with the staff, brainstorming ideas and playing with hundreds of different images. Sean Adams>> And in the end, the idea of simply showing fire. It doesn't have to burn anything. It's not burning film. It's not some funny allegory. It's just fire. The reader can do anything they want with that. I mean, some people have said to me, "Oh, I love it. It's like coming together around the campfire." That's what it meant to them. And in the environment of Park City, of course, in the middle of winter, it did have a real warming sensation and all the things that fire might represent. Noreen Morioka>> Passion, Sean, passion. It's hard for him to say that word passion. Sean Adams>> That's a scary one for me, you know (laughter). Val Zavala>> If these business partners remind you of an old married couple, it's because they've known each other for more than twenty-five years. Sean remembers the day they met at CalArts. Sean Adams>> You walk into Registration at CalArts in the early 1980s, which I shouldn't admit to, but it's this sea of bizarre clothing and people with like Pippi Longstocking hair and tattoos and, of course, I'm clueless. I'm wearing a tennis sweater. You know, I had no idea what I was walking into. I look across the room and I see this girl in pink pedal-pushers, so I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to talk to her. She looks safe." So that's actually how we ended up meeting and it sort of worked out perfectly that way. Val Zavala>> They started their careers in what Noreen calls -- Noreen Morioka>> The fat 1980s where people had a great deal of budgets. They had a lot of photography. They had a lot of printing colors. You know, I think what ended up happening is a great deal of beautiful eye candy. So I think the design of that time was terribly impressive because it was crafted in such a way that it really was about the visuals that you saw. But as that recession hit, all of a sudden, all the budgets went down, right? There wasn't enough for printing. There wasn't enough for photography. There wasn't enough for writing. Everything just went flat. What Sean and I felt was, at that time, well, if you really are smart with your money, then you could really make the best out of two colors and maybe no photography and great messaging and content. We realized that the only way that we were going to create this kind of new way of thinking was to start our own firm. Val Zavala>> Another one of their clients is USC. They were asked to design recruiting materials, but they didn't want to use the clichéd image of multi-cultural students tossing Frisbees on the quad. They wanted something more real, but how to get it? Noreen Morioka>> So what we ended up doing is we took five hundred different disposable Kodak cameras that had a flash on them -- we didn't cheap out (laughter) -- and we distributed them throughout all the students and to some faculty and even to some advisers and asked them to go out and shoot a day of USC. Sean Adams>> So what we got back was sort of what you would expect like horribly exposed, blurry images. Some were incredible and composed beautifully and some were just like snapshots. Noreen Morioka>> It ended up being probably one of the most fun moments for us. Sean Adams>> In the end, they worked beautifully because they were so honest and authentic and we weren't going to lie about anything. We didn't go in and like Photoshop out the mess. If a dorm was messy, we let it be messy. If there was a political sign on a wall, we let it be there. We wanted that experience to be honest. Val Zavala>> Probably the biggest challenge facing graphic designers these days is staying on the cutting edge and that means understanding how people consume information. Sean says the younger generation, people in their twenties and thirties, absorb information differently. Sean Adams>> I think we, in our age group, are passive in terms of the way we digest information. We wait for the television to give us information. We wait to be told this is on at this point, this is on at this point. But today, kids program their own entertainment. They program their own content. They go on line and find what they want. So they're much more in charge of being authors of their own entertainment or their own information experience than I think we're used to being, and that's a huge challenge. How then do you as a designer deal with information in a way? I mean, even something as simple as like TiVo, right? Before the TiVo machine came along, you never saw any of that thing on the bottom of the screen, the lower third, the pop-up, that said, "Up next, it's Pamela Anderson like Girls Gone Wild", you know? That's because, with TiVo, you're just flipping through those commercials, so the networks have got to get that information to you in another way. [Film Clip] Val Zavala>> This could mean that our cluttered world will get even more cluttered. [Film Clip] Val Zavala>> No matter what the message or the method, if you're going to tackle the future, there's no better place to do it than here in southern California. Sean Adams>> I think Joan Didion once said something about you're on the edge of the continent. There's nowhere else to go. So if you can't make it work here, it's never going to work (laughter). I think that's why people are sort of willing to try anything. I think, for the most part, the thing we all share is this idea that you're not trapped in the past. You're not sort of stuck with like, well, it's always been done this way and books always have to look that way. Each time, you have to think, "What's a new way of doing this?" What's the most exciting fresh way we can think of making something, to talk to someone in a different way? Noreen Morioka>> You're kind of like a cowboy. Sean Adams>> Yeah, I guess I am or sort of, or like desert rats (laughter), scrappy desert rats. Noreen Morioka>> (Laughter) I don't really know that. I think a cowboy is a lot more romantic than a desert rat. Val Zavala>> If you'd like to learn more about the world of graphic arts, you can go to the website for the American Institute of Graphic Arts at aiga.org. And that's our program. 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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