KCET UpDaily

Ballot Guide for American Life, From A to Z

2012-11-06T23:45:04Z

Photo: seanmcmenemy/Flickr/Creative Commons License

Today voters across the country are going to the polls, mostly likely to face a mind-rattling list of measures and initiatives. In Ventura County, California, where I live, we will vote on a dozen measures, encompassing topics ranging from the death penalty to labeling for genetically engineered foods. The voter guide explaining these measures is only slightly less sizeable than The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. It, too, is written in English, although sometimes it is hard to tell.

As I write this, debate regarding these measures -- not to mention the Senate, Congressional and Presidential races -- has reached fever pitch. The din of shouting is certainly not unique to California. Beneath all the noise, I hear the whisper of things lost.

And so I propose a ballot of simple measures. You will receive no mailers or phone calls attempting to influence you. There will be no TV, radio, or internet blitz. I won't even tell you how I'm going to vote, though you may be able to guess.

It is possible to think quietly on our own about such things, and debate the issues with respect and reserve. Nothing is preventing us from doing so.

Maybe these measures will help. Maybe they won't. It's up to you to decide.

]]> Measure A. For All of us. In this together.

Measure B. For Beginnings. Sometimes things look impossibly overwhelming, and they will remain that way if we don't make a start.

Measure C. For Cooperation. So that we might work together, instead of squaring off like petulant children.

Measure D. For agreeing to Disagree, politely.

Measure E. For Effort. Because that's what hard things take.

Measure F. For the Freedom to choose. This is no off-handed gift; so many died to give us this right.

Measure G. For Generosity. Sometimes we have to give so that others may benefit.

Measure H. For Honesty. There is nothing deceiving about any of these measures. There are no loopholes or fine print. What you see is what you get. What is written is what is delivered. A good way to construct a measure, and a life.

Measure I. As in the pronoun. Which should follow a step behind We.

Measure J. As in the Judicious application of common sense.

Measure K. For Kindness. Admittedly closely tied to several other measures, but this one cannot be repeated enough. If you've ever experienced kindness, the power of this measure requires no further explanation.

Measure L. For Loyalty. To a cause great than our own.

Measure M. For putting Me aside when it matters.

Measure N. For No. No more self-interest, no more deceit, no more ugly divisiveness.

Measure O. For Open-Mindedness. A closed mind ends any hope of progress.

Measure P. For Patience. Things take time.

Measure Q. For Quality. Why would we settle for anything less?

Measure R. For Resourcefulness. Let's apply this measure to help solve our problems. It has produced miracles in the past.

Measure S. For Service.

Measure T. For Team Spirit. Admittedly some overlap here too, but again we can't have too much of this. From the Declaration of Independence on, this country has accomplished wondrous things working together.

Measure U. For Unity. It's what made our country great. Somehow we've lost it in a cloud of divisiveness, but it has been there all the time. We are, after all, the United States.

Measure V. For Vote. Still only a dream in so many countries, but dreams come true here.

Measure W. For Wisdom. And the ability to see the truth through the fog.

Measure X. For the pursuit of Excellence in every endeavor we undertake. Including education.

Measure Y. For You. Your decisions can make a difference.

Measure Z. For the mandatory inclusion of Zucchini in every baked casserole. Because this wouldn't be a ballot without at least one head-scratching measure.

Attention, RSS Readers: We're Changing Feeds

2012-11-06T23:22:31Z

Image: RafaEU Faria/Flickr/CCL

KCET will very soon be going through some structural changes on the back and front ends, most notably the change from UpDaily to News. That means if you subscribe to the full UpDaily RSS feed, you'll stop getting updates in your reader (don't worry if you only subscribe to individual blogs like SoCal Focus yet). To be clear, the following feeds will be changed:

http://www.kcet.org/updaily/atom.xml
http://www.kcet.org/updaily/kcetnews.xml

The new RSS feed will be:

http://www.kcet.org/news/atom.xml

We apologize for the inconveniences and hope to see you on the other side!

Friday Night Lights: Football, Pride, and Tradition in Riverside

2012-11-06T01:25:00Z

The baby cheerleaders stood gazing up at the big cheerleaders who'd draped gleaming blue and gold beads around their necks, the girls who shepherded them around the infield on a fall night of high school football. The players standing along the sidelines towered over them, and the parents of seniors burst through an arch of balloons with their sons. Other parents sold tacos and hot dogs and bracelets that read "Husky Pride in Riverside."

When my oldest daughter Gaila moved to Texas, she made us watch the popular TV series "Friday Night Lights" because, as she told her father and me, "I realized you guys are exactly the same in Riverside. Everyone still goes to the football games, twenty years after they've graduated! It's crazy."

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She was right. I sat in the stands with him, and all around us were the men who've taught us everything about pride. "We haven't missed a game in twenty years," said Glenn King, who taught Dwayne and his brother Derrick in elementary school, and Pete Anderson, who was the assistant principal then. "Well, I missed two," said Marshall Anderson, sitting beside us, ducking his head shyly. (Can I say how difficult it is not to insert "Mr." before these names? Very hard.) We went to school with his sons, who used to play football on that same field lit up below us. The stands were filled with hundreds of people whose children and grandchildren were once down there on the infield.

This was the historic cross-town rivalry between JW North and Riverside Polytechnic, the kind of rivalry played out in every city and town in America during the fall football season. They were playing on neutral territory -- the field at Riverside Community College, where the classic quad on the hill behind the field was built in 1924, when this was Riverside High School. My mother-in-law graduated from Riverside Poly in 1958, after walking these same steps and paths that led us here tonight. Her son and I went to North, and her grandchildren have gone to both schools.

It's a classic Southern California night in late October, the Santa Ana winds softened to breeze that ruffles the fronds of the century-old palms leading up to Cheap Hill, where spectators who want to watch from up high, for free, line the curbside. (We've been up there many times for college games.) The stadium sits in Tequesquite Arroyo, a beautiful bowl of old buildings and bougainvillea spilling over walls and eucalyptus shivering like silver feathers in the night air.

North and Poly have both sent generations of athletes to college and professional sports. Bobby Bonds went to Poly, Alvin Davis went to North. On the sidelines, there are always Calhoun players and graduates, and tonight is no exception -- James Calhoun played for North, then Riverside Community College, and he now helps coach the freshman team. (He stands with Tatyana Calhoun, featured in an earlier story.) Down on the field, the Baugh family celebrates wide receiver Marcus, headed to Ohio State next fall on a full scholarship. (One of the current stars for Texas Tech, Sedale Foster, played for North, then RCC. His brother Denzil is a Husky running back now. The Hale brothers, Greg and Roy, played for Poly last year, and for RCC now. Many generations of Poly and North athletes have gone on to college or pros.)

But football is not just the game. It's the whole American tradition of spectacle and community out here. Also on the sidelines: Chuck Beaty, who was our principal, along with Dale Kinnear, former principal. Sue Rainey, former Superintendent of Schools for Riverside. Basketball Coach for decades, Mike Bartee, who is married to Rebecca Porter, now Director of Student Activities, but when she was in the Class of '77, a year ahead of me, a cheerleader.

Tonight Porter is everywhere, helping the mini-cheerleaders get ready for their half-time performance with the big cheerleaders. Behind her, running around the track whenever the Huskies score a touchdown, Bobby Magby (Class of '78) wields a huge flag and a CIF championship ring. Though his kids are graduated, the same year as mine, he doesn't miss a game, either. And he was in that same elementary school class with Mr. King, who laughs about that when I sit beside him in the stands.

No one leaves, no matter the score. At the beginning of the fourth quarter, Magby leads the traditional cheer ("Fourth Quarter, North Quarter!") and hoists the flag again. At game's end, everyone's still visiting. The Avatongo family gathers on the sidelines -- their daughter was Homecoming Queen two weeks ago, wearing traditional Tongan dress along with her father.

Some places in America may appear to be re-separating into distinct communities, dividing by race and religion and class, but no one could be here in this arroyo and believe that. Where my mother-in-law, a black woman with many white friends, walked on these cement paths, my own daughters have friends on both sides of the field -- North and Poly. Where Pete Anderson sits gazing down, after recalling that when he first arrived in Riverside, after being stationed at March Air Force Base like so many other men of his generation, California was very segregated. He was born in Richmond, Virginia. He recalls not being able to buy a house where he wanted to, back in 1953, nor children being able to swim in a city pool. Marshall Anderson was born in Riverside, to parents who'd come from Texas.

These men watch the children of now, laughing with each other, tackling each other, cheering with each other, and marrying each other. We all sit in the autumn wind here in this place carved out by rushing water over thousands of years, sending our children to North High and Poly High to be Huskies and Bears who learn how to survive in the rest of the larger world. College, professional life, and maybe they'll go far away. But we know that like us, many of them will come here for the next twenty years. We hope so. We hope they'll only miss two games, if any, and that they'll hold onto their pride forever.

Her new novel "Between Heaven and Here" was published September 12 by McSweeney's Books. Her novel "Highwire Moon" is about a California-born daughter searching for her Mexican-born mother. Doug McCulloh's photographs have been exhibited across the U.S. and in Mexico, Europe, and China. His fourth book "Dream Street" chronicles the builders, workers, and homebuyers of a subdivision in Southern California. Read more of their stories here.

Assessing the Values of 'Pacific Standard Time'

2012-11-05T22:00:00Z

| Image: Courtesy The Getty

Years in development and lasting longer than its official run, Pacific Standard Time's gargantuan survey of mid-20th century art and design generated tens of millions of dollars in unanticipated spending. From hotel rooms to exhibition catalogs, visitors -- about 84 percent from Southern California itself -- spent (according to a Los Angeles Times report) $111.5 million to attend events at the 60-plus museums and galleries that joined in the Getty-sponsored program.

About 1.8 million persons attended at least one of the events held under the Pacific Standard Time banner. Nearly half of them came specifically because of PST.

]]> The total "value" of PST, based on indirect benefits, could be as high as $280 million, according to a study by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation. Cities and counties directly benefited from almost $20 million in sales and hotel taxes.

PST was a lot of fun, too.

Adding up the dollars and the bodies is contemporary America's measures of some kind of success. We're all corporate, now. But PST generated other values as well.

Most obviously, Southern Californians encountered their cultural past is ways they might never have. Diverse and dismissive of artificial boundaries, PST had the loose and hybrid character of the years PST surveyed. For some visitors, the encounter will have widened what they thought was art -- not just landscapes with eucalyptus trees or Warhol-ian pop, but planks of glowing acrylic or, in some cases, a wash of light on a gallery wall.

For the most part, PST encouraged a broad view of what art and design were in Southern California between the end of World War II and 1980 -- an essential "staking out of the territory" (literally and imaginatively) from which the art being created today can be judged.

This enlargement included many of the sites where that art was first shown. PST expanded the geography of art in Southern California, at least for some of us, to include college and municipal galleries that often get only local attention.

It will be one of the lasting effects of PST if art patrons continue to wander to Long Beach and Pomona and Santa Barbara and San Diego to see what's going on.

And PST's most important legacy could be the linkages that these museums and galleries made through the Getty. We're such a dispersed people, who would benefit from cultural institutions routinely working together.

The Getty has already lined up a gathering of post-PST architecture exhibitions that will begin in mid-2013. Three museums in San Diego are working collaboratively on an exhibition that gathers up works from their permanent collections to be displayed in new combinations in all three locations. In a few years, the Getty may even take another slice from art and design in Southern California and orchestrate another encounter with our vision of ourselves.

PST focused on what it was like to be here, engaged in art making (including messing around with new technologies), when Southern California shrugged off its genteel art tradition. We were trying on the new then, and the cut was not always the best, but we were optimistic (mostly) that the new would reveal something of importance about ourselves, if only we had the desire to investigate it.

D. J. Waldie, author and historian, writes about Los Angeles twice each week at KCET's SoCal Focus blog.

Managing Perceptions of the Occupy L.A. Raid: The Tyson Heder Trial

2012-11-05T21:30:01Z

Editor's Note: Jason Rosencrantz is a downtown L.A. resident who last year became an active participant in Occupy Los Angeles and wrote commentary about the movement for KCET. The LAPD's eviction of occupiers at the park surrounding L.A. City Hall brought about numerous arrests, including that of Tyson Heder. Documenting a number of court cases was not just personal for Rosencrantz, but also about keeping a historical record, told through story.

On the night of the eviction of Occupy L.A., KCAL9 broadcast live footage of an increasingly violent confrontation between a videographer and a cluster of LAPD officers in tactical gear.

It was perhaps the most sensational interaction captured by the embedded press pool that night, and the incident stood in marked contrast to the after-action analysis proffered by LAPD Chief Beck and Mayor Villaraigosa -- that the eviction stood as an exemplary instance of "constitutional policing," characterized by restraint, professionalism, and an "absolutely minimal" use of force.

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As if to consolidate this interpretation, the City Attorney's Office charged the videographer, Tyson Heder, with four counts of resisting arrest and two counts each of battery and assault. After almost a year of motions and deliberations, wherein the assault charges were eventually dropped, final verdicts on the other six charges -- including two counts of battery on a police officer in the form of "spitting" -- were reached last week in a trial presided over by Judge Yvette Verastegui in Department 6 of the East L.A. Courthouse.

Leading the prosecution was Deputy City Attorney Jennifer Waxler, a familiar face at Occupy L.A.-related trials, who called eight police officers to testify against Heder.

The Plan

The plan to evict Occupy L.A. had been developed over the previous month by a "planning cell" led by Sgt. Brian Morrison, the prosecution's first witness.

Sgt. Morrison described how he was deployed to Oakland on November 3rd in the wake of the evictions of Occupiers from Ogawa/Grant Plaza in order "to learn what happened" there and to prepare for an eviction of Occupy L.A. "once civic leaders decided."

Sgt. Morrison, a straight-arrow '50s throwback type who described himself as "in charge of the tactical eviction of the park" described the plan: 1100 tactical police and 300 support officers would be used, since the "best way" to "minimize force" is "to create an overwhelming force." The overall goal, explained Sgt. Morrison, would be "to prevent a disorderly egress."

To accomplish this goal, the park would be broken into sectors, each consisting of an unpaved area that for months had been occupied by tents. These sectors were numbered clockwise around the center of the main lawn to the south, then up along the thin strip of lawn to the west, and finally to the north lawn of City Hall.

Teams of tactical police would move to establish skirmish lines around each sector, but the skirmish lines were to remain porous and allow people to leave until after the official dispersal order was given. After allowing a final chance to comply with the dispersal order, the skirmish lines would then be sealed and all who failed to leave would be arrested.

There was a last minute change, however, that would create some confusion. As the execution phase approached, the command staff became aware of a hole in their plans: the center paved area at the base of the south steps, where people had been accustomed to gather for General Assemblies, was being filled with people linking arms in solidarity and telegraphing their intention to stay.

In response, the area was designated as an additional sector. "Sector 9 was a late addition" created "about 15 minutes before the operation," explained Sgt. Morrison. It was on the stairs just above this ad hoc sector that the altercation between the LAPD and Tyson Heder took place.

First Contact

The first officer to make physical contact with Mr. Heder was Sergeant Rudy Barillas, a 15-year vet of the LAPD who delivered his testimony in a low and gravely monotone -- think Christian Bale's voice from under the Batman mask.

From the witness stand, Sgt. Barillas explained that his main objective was to help secure Sector 1, just to the west of the south stairs, and echoed Morrison's description of the overall plan: "people were going to be asked to leave, then arrested if non-compliant."

Sgt. Barillas recounted how he first saw Heder on the stairs as he was getting into position, but what exactly happened next was the subject of much controversy over the course of the trial -- and would ultimately prove decisive when it came time for the Jury to deliberate.

Under questioning from Waxler, Sgt. Barillas said it was his "intention" to get Heder off the stairs and direct him to one of the two media areas, either at the top or the bottom of the stairs.

This talk of "intention" initiated an awkward back and forth between Waxler and her witness as she struggled to get Sgt. Barillas to distinguish between his private intentions and his actual words and actions.

If that was your intention, asked Ms. Waxler, "what did you actually do?"

"I grabbed him in the elbow-bicep area," said Barillas. "And I tried to push him into Sector 1."

"But did you say anything?" asked Waxler.

Barillas, as if realizing what the prosecutor was looking for, finally recalled that he said, "come with me."

When asked how the defendant responded to being grabbed, Sgt. Barillas' stoic visage bubbled with emotion -- something like repressed rage: "He said, 'Fuck you! You haven't told me to leave! Fuck you!'"

The defendant then "held onto the railing," according to Sgt. Barillas, and continued to yell obscenities until "he spit on me... on the chin and chest area."

Under cross-examination by Mr. Heder's lawyer (also friend and surfing buddy) Joe Singleton, however, Sgt. Barillas qualified and reversed much of this testimony.

Sgt. Barillas admitted that he approached Mr. Heder from behind, hidden from view. Reviewing the video before the jury, he couldn't hear himself saying "come with me" at all -- though he could hear subtle atmospheric sounds such as footsteps on a tarp. Ultimately Sgt. Barillas admitted that he never announced his presence.

The video also showed that Mr. Heder did not use any profanity when first grabbed, contrary to Sgt. Barillas' earlier testimony.

He also conceded that Mr. Heder was standing outside of Sector 1, which was Barillas' primary objective to secure, and that he had no reason to expect that Mr. Heder wanted to bring harm to any officer.

Sgt. Barillas exhibited other inconsistencies as well. He initially reported to his colleagues that Mr. Heder "touched" him -- with no mention of "spitting." In fact, the spitting charge only appears in an "arrest supplemental report" drafted months later at the request of Sgt. Morrison, who oversaw the eviction operation.

Worse still, Sgt. Barillas couldn't decide upon when the alleged spitting took place. At one time testifying that the spitting happened as a result of the baton push and at another time testifying that the baton push happened as a result of the spitting.

Incidentally, according to Sgt. Barillas, the baton push had no causal connection to Mr. Heder falling down the stairs -- first Sgt. Barillas pushed the defendant with his baton, then the defendant "tripped on the tent."

Under Waxler's redirection, Sgt. Barillas explained that as a police officer he has the right to arrest someone without announcing himself if he has probable cause. Ms. Waxler, however, failed to get Sgt. Barillas to articulate what exactly that probable cause was -- and the question was left hanging in the air until closing arguments.

Much Evidence, Not Much Coherence

Other police witnesses had similar problems cobbling together a coherent story out of their police reports, the memories, and the video evidence.

Captain Incontro and Negative Space:

For example, Captain John Incontro, the top ranking officer on the south lawn that night, testified that he heard two officers ask Mr. Heder to leave the area before the incident occurred, and that by refusing to leave Mr. Heder was "obstructing officers from getting their work done."

But upon cross examination, Singleton got Incontro to testify that he did not personally witness the beginning of the incident, and that the video, contrary to his personal recollection, reveals no officers asking Mr. Heder to leave either before or after the beginning of the incident.

Redirecting, the Deputy City Attorney articulated a theme that she would return to again and again whenever police testimony seemed to conflict with video evidence. She argued -- in the form of questions to the witness -- that video "represents a limited perspective," and that the scene was noisy and often nothing can be heard over the defendant's yelling. Captain Incontro's testimony, therefore, "did not pertain to what was just on the video, but what was actually occurring that night."

Officer Vago and the First Takedown.

The testimony of Officer Thomas Vago was also problematic. Vago, an import from Harbor Division for the big event, was among those officers who joined in pressing their weight against Mr. Heder once he was taken to the ground. During the incident, Officer Vago distinguished himself by being the first to punch the defendant.

"I punched him in the right thigh, four or five times, to overcome his resistance and gain compliance." Such "distraction strikes" were necessary, he explained, in order to get Mr. Heder to unwrap the camera strap around his wrist, and then to cuff him and lead him to "safety."

Vago also had to reverse testimony that Mr. Heder was told to "let go of the strap," and countered earlier police testimony that Mr. Heder was kicking while they were trying to cuff him. Officer Vago, who was "bear hugging" Mr. Heder's legs at the time, testified that he never kicked.

Officers Medina and Barber and the Second Takedown

The most dramatic case of two police contradicting each other's testimony happened when first Officer Joshua Medina, and then his partner, Officer Barber, were called to the witness stand.

On this much they agreed: After being called to assist with cuffing the defendant, they were tasked with leading Heder away for processing. The field jail had been set up on Temple and Main, so they took the most direct route that night -- up the south stairs and through the interior of City Hall.

Once inside and just beyond reach of any embedded or independent media, Mr. Heder was for the second time that night tackled to the ground, accused of spitting, and punched -- this time in the face by Officer Medina.

Officer Medina, a five-year vet with a boyish face, who normally works gang enforcement detail in the 77th precinct, explained that Mr. Heder "got loose out of the flex cuffs." That's when he noticed a second metal cuff "dangling" from one of Mr. Heder's wrists. Since "a metallic cuff can be used as a weapon" they decide to "forcibly take him to the ground" into a "felony prone position," their knees once again pressed into Mr. Heder's back.

Mr. Heder was "still being aggressive and hostile towards us," and "trying to kick," accused Officer Medina. That's when Officer Medina notices "speckles of spit on my face-shield [and] formed the opinion that he spit on me." Then, when Mr. Heder "makes a facial expression, I thought he was going to spit on me again... [so] I punch him two times in the face and eye area."

On that much Officers Medina and Barber agreed, but they had very different recollections of what happened next.

Officer Medina recalled that he and his partner sat with the defendant "for 30-45 minutes," during which time Mr. Heder was "not moving much anymore." Then, after they regained their strength, they delivered the defendant through the building and out again to the field jail. In the last leg of the journey, Mr. Heder went limp in an act of passive resistance. They then returned to look for security cameras that might have captured their actions -- but found none.

But under oath Officer Barber testified that they held the defendant to the floor for just "seven or eight minutes" and that he and his partner never went back to look for security camera evidence.

Finally, Officer Medina's police report stated that four officers led Mr. Heder away for processing, not just he and his partner. But, no, "those two officers were not there," he explained. "That was the arrest of Danny Johnson."

Reasonable Use of Force

The prosecution's final witness was Sgt. James Katapodis, a 34-year LAPD vet now in charge of a LAPD leadership course adopted from Westpoint Military Academy.

Sgt. Katapodis was there as an expert on the use of force, and Waxler guided him though each instance -- Sgt. Barillas' baton push, Officer Vago's "distraction strikes," the takedown by officers Medina and Barbara as well as Medina's punches to Mr. Heder's face.

"Everything I saw was reasonable and consistent with what we teach at the Academy," declared Sgt. Katapodis.

In response, Singleton called David Dusenbury, a retired Long Beach Deputy Chief of Police with experience on review boards that took place in the wake of the Rodney King beating, to give competing expert testimony on the proper use of force.

"I saw no evidence that Mr. Heder committed any crime in any of the videos," noted Dusenbury. Moreover, the actions of Sgt. Barillas were "absolutely uncalled for" and "constituted misconduct," especially when "he pushed Mr. Heder down a flight of stairs" because of the "potential for substantial bodily damage."

Dusenbury thought that Sgt. Barillas' actions were "so egregious," in fact, that Captain Incontro should have "relieved him of duty" and then "initiated a complaint" against him.

Grabbing must come with instructions, explained Dusenbury, and police officers must identify themselves. Mr. Heder was reasonably "irate" after he was pushed down the stairs, but was "not a threat, other than coming up the stairs and demanding to know Sgt. Barillas' name."

What should Sgt. Barillas have done?

"He should have provided a name," said Dusenbury.

Furthermore, during the times when several police officers were kneeling their weight into Mr. Heder's back and neck area, there was a significant danger of "compression asphyxia" -- a situation where the lungs are unable to inhale after exhaling due to the pressure on his back.

Finally, Dusenbury questioned the competence of the team of police officers unable to cuff a single subject.

Tyson Heder's P.O.V.

After patiently and silently listening to so many police officers testify against him, Tyson Heder was finally called to the witness stand by his friend and lawyer to tell his side of the story.

Heder explained that he had never been to an Occupy event before, and wouldn't have been there on the night of the eviction if he hadn't been at the Redwood bar, just a few blocks away, shooting a local band for his website.

After the shoot, he noticed helicopters circling City Hall and, camera still charged, decided to investigate.

Focusing on the viewfinder of his CANON EOS 60D that he held at "chest level," Heder entered the park from 1st Street and into a "peaceful" and "casual" atmosphere he thought "felt like a street fair" or "public gathering."

Equipped with a wide-angle lens, he meandered through the crowd and up City Hall's south stairs in order to capture a wide shot of the unusual event.

As columns of police filed down the right and left sides of the staircase, a detail caught the videographer's eye -- a sign critical of the Mayor posted on the central handrail.

With an eye towards composition, he began to frame a shot of one of the police columns emerging from behind the sign. That is when "somebody grabbed [him] from behind."

"Don't touch me!" he yelled, repeatedly, until he is pushed with a police baton and tumbles down the stairs.

He never spit on anyone, he claimed, either before or after being pushed down the stairs.

Jumping back up, he yelled "Dickhead, what is your name?"

"I'm not schooled in this," he mused, "but I know enough to find out the person's name who assaults you. I would have filled out a report or found the appropriate steps."

Then things moved quickly. At the same time as being told to put his hands on his head, he felt hands on his neck and back -- "that's when the swarm begins."

He didn't pull away from anyone, he says, but officers grabbed him from different directions, sending everyone into a "spiral."

"In my subconscious is my camera," recalled Heder, "a $900 piece of equipment that I didn't get easily... I was trying to protect my camera, so I didn't break my fall with my hands," he says. Reliving the takedown, the 35-year-old's calm demeanor breaks with emotion, and takes a moment to fight back tears. "Excuse me," he said before continuing on.

At the bottom of the dog pile, he remembers being confused and that his thought process was reduced to a single directive: "just hold onto the camera... it's the only record of what happened to me."

He testified that ne never resisted, but merely tried to breathe, that his arms were behind his back, that he was being hit, and that he was confused and, above all, scared.

After being led away up the stairs and into City Hall, he recalls stumbling and being pulled into the building. "My first sensation was my face against the cold marble floor," he said, again taking a moment to fight back tears.

Inside City Hall, as he was being punched in the face, he remembers thinking "'I got my camera, I got my camera" before slipping into unconsciousness.

Deputy City Attorney Waxler's cross exam consisted of taking Mr. Heder once again through the series of videos, step by step, trying unsuccessfully to catch him is a contradiction or admit to failing to respond to a command.

"I was not resisting," he says regarding the dog pile. "The only movement I did was to keep my head from being crushed to the ground."

"My hands were behind my back," he says after being asked why he didn't give up his hands. "They were given up as much as they could be... All I wanted to do was get air in my lungs and hold onto my camera."

Probable Cause

Ultimately, Sgt. Morrison's testimony describing the grand plan would set the stage for the Singleton's closing argument. The overarching goal of the plan, "to prevent a disorderly egress," obviously entails that the police allow an orderly egress, but the last-minute addition of Sector 9 complicated things by effectively sealing the natural exit route from the south steps.

But Mr. Heder was never even asked to leave, even as Sgt. Barillas himself begrudgingly admitted. And because Mr. Heder was given no instructions, the question of Heder's guilt regarding all the resistance charges brought against him largely hinged upon whether Barillas had probable cause to arrest him.

That he was violating park hours was a non-starter, since these had not been enforced for two months, and there were literally hundreds of other people in the park at that time not being arrested. In any case, the LAPD's own eviction plan called for allowing people to leave the park until after the official dispersal order, which wasn't delivered by Officer Orlando Nieves until Mr. Heder had already been pushed, tackled, and punched. The City Attorney's office never even bothered to charge Mr. Heder with violating park hours.

So what was the probable cause to arrest? On pain of absurdity, it couldn't be for resisting arrest itself.

Much of Waxler's case rested upon Mr. Heder "failing to obey commands," so she scoured the videos for instances when police can be heard communicating to Mr. Heder.

In the case of Captain Incontro, for example, there were two such instances. The first was a "come hither" motion he made with his white-gloved hand.

"I am trying to get him to come to us so that we can arrest him without injury," he explains. "My plan was to get him to submit to an arrest."

When Heder fails to respond to that subtle gesture, Incontro told the defendant to "put his hands on his head." But Sgt. Barillas testified that Mr. Heder had "less than a second" to respond before his hands were grabbed and taken to the ground.

Verdict and Post Trial

In the end, Tyson Heder was cleared of all the charges brought against him.

The Jury came back from deliberation with unanimous "not guilty" verdicts on 4 of the 6 charges, and since the majority of the Jury leaned "not guilty" on the remaining 2 charges, they were ultimately dismissed.

After the verdict, and the jury were free to discuss the case; they gathered in the hallway with the lawyers from both sides for post trial analysis.

Overwhelmingly, they said they considered Sgt. Barillas' testimony to be "inconsistent" and "unbelievable," and that, generally speaking, it was "conflicting testimony" on the part of the police that undermined the prosecutor's case.

The fact that the arrest of Mr. Heder seemed to be unlawful from the beginning inclined the majority of the jurors to dismiss all subsequent charges leveled against him.

The only question on which the juror's disagreed was whether Mr. Heder's alleged act of passive resistance -- lifting his legs and going limp when, after being pushed and tackled and beaten, he was finally carried to the detention van -- constituted "resisting" Officers Medina and Barber.

One juror went as far as to compare the spitting charges to comedian Dave Chappelle's joke about "sprinkling crack" on victims of police brutality.

In a victorious mood, Mr. Singleton indicated his next move: "I plan to sue the LAPD and the city of Los Angeles for violating Mr. Heder's Constitutional rights."

Managing Perceptions

I wondered why the City Attorney's office chose to so aggressively charge and prosecute the battered videographer, especially in the light of recent news about the budget office's proposed cuts to the City Attorney's staff. How much does a two-week trial, especially one with so many police witnesses, cost the city? The city's chief prosecutor, the politically ambitious but recently frustrated Carmen Trutanich, has a well-known history for aggressively targeting political activists -- perhaps he confused the explicitly non-activist videographer for an agitator.

In her opening argument, Deputy City Attorney Waxler claimed that there were only "two types" of people in the park that night -- those "there to protest against the 1%" and those whose only goal was "to rally against the police." Heder's "aggressive behavior" clearly put him in the latter category, so the police "had to react" while using "as little and as reasonable force as was necessary."

I asked Waxler whether she or someone else in the City Attorney's Office was responsible for choosing to prosecute Mr. Heder for these charges, and also what her reaction to the verdict was.

To both questions she responded with "no comment."

I suppose it could be a matter of perception -- what one person sees as a disoriented videographer struggling for breath, another sees as a criminal resisting arrest. Sgt. Scott Stevens, another officer called to testify (in the video, he was the one yelling "Stop resisting!"), thought that it was "obvious from the video" that Mr. Heder was "not being beaten," and Ms. Waxler in her closing arguments told the jury that they "can see how the defendant is resisting."

Perhaps the perception of Mr. Heder as a dangerous criminal has something to do with the fear that police feel for the public they are meant to serve. Captain Incontro, for example, spoke of his concern about "pockets of darkness" and the possibility of people "in the trees" throwing urine and feces at his officers -- as if they were entering a range of wild monkeys. At least two officers commented on the defendant's physical size, as if a few extra inches or pounds would give Heder an unfair advantage against the overwhelming force put together by the LAPD command staff.

The management of perception is a dominant theme for the entire incident. Sgt. Morrison had a "plan for credentialed media" that would "grant access" to an exclusive media pool made up of establishment organizations that are, in my opinion, fearful, dismissive, and jealous of citizen journalism.

These establishment sources trade deference to power for access, such as when broadcasters from KCAL9 -- part of the LAPD-vetted media pool -- freely admitted to censoring its own skycam footage to "protect the integrity of the police action."

Captain Incontro talked about the media relations officers whose job it was to "direct" the media pool, and Sgt. Barillas "noticed he didn't have credentials" before pushing Mr. Heder with down the stairs with his baton.

Another telling moment was Captain Intontro's very different handling of embedded press, even when they got in the way of police operations. Captain Incontro testified that the KCAL9 cameraman's mounted light was a "safety issue" and was "interfering" with his officers as they wrestled with Mr. Heder -- but there was no question of arresting the embedded cameraman, much less tackling him to the ground and punching him in the face.

In the end, the Jury members did not perceive that Tyson Heder was guilty of anything, though it might have gone differently if his own video footage had not survived to be shown in court. But one can detect in Heder's trial a warning to unembedded perspectives on major police actions. Independent journalists, beware! Not only do you risk being tackled and beaten and jailed, you may also spend the better part of a year defending yourself against trumped up charges brought against you by the City Attorney's Office.

Californians, Go Vote!

2012-11-05T19:10:00Z

Photo: KCIvey/Flickr/Creative Commons License

I have a one-word suggestion for my post today: vote. A record number of us have registered to vote. This could be at least in part due to the fact that for the first time ever we could register to vote online. More than three fourths of us who are eligible to vote have registered to do so. But now there is one more step, we must go out and exercise that right.

]]> If you received a vote-by-mail ballot and have yet to mail it in in, no problem, go drop it off at a polling place. If you were considering going to your local polling place, I would ask you to move from the considering it to planning on it.

While California may not be a so-called "swing state" there are still many important races to weigh in on. Candidates for federal, state, and local elected offices are asking us if they can be our representatives. In addition, Californians have been asked to weigh in on 11 ballot measures (ten initiatives and one referendum), which could deeply impact many of those living in our state.

I am not going to tell you to vote because it was so hard for many of us to get the right to vote and/or the right to an equally weighted vote (although I suppose I just did). I am not going to tell you to vote because as a result of Hurricane Sandy and other circumstances voters in the rest of the country face numerous obstacles that voters in the Golden State hopefully will not (although, again, I suppose I just did).

I am urging you to exercise your fundamental right to vote because it is a preservative right. By definition it is the right that helps to protect our rights in so many areas. All of the campaigning comes down to us. We are the "deciders." Our representative form of government depends on the ability and willingness of its representatives to exercise their right to vote.

Jessica Levinson writes about the intersection of law and government every Monday. She is an Associate Clinical Professor at Loyola Law School. Read more of her posts here.

L.A. Public Library's 'Million Maps' -- From Collector to Curator

2012-11-02T21:00:00Z

| Clip Art

Glen Creason is an author and map librarian at the central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, and co-curator in 2008 of the exhibition "LA Unfolded: Maps from the Los Angeles Public Library." Glen also is the somewhat overwhelmed recipient of an unknown number of maps -- one estimate was a million -- retrieved at the last minute from the Mount Washington home of the late John Feathers.

]]> I had the pleasure of writing the introduction to Glen's wonderful book Los Angeles in Maps in 2010. And he and I will get together again later in November to talk about the city's map collection at a library foundation event. The astonishing "million map" discovery will surely be on everyone's mind.

John Feathers wasn't on anyone's list of important map collectors when, following his death in February, his small home was found to be stuffed with every sort of map, from ancient charts to contemporary atlases. Only after real estate broker Matthew Greenberg brought the hoard to light was the extent of Feathers' collecting apparent.

The number of maps probably isn't a million, but they total well over ten thousand.

Feathers was a born collector of maps, according to his father. He had twin passions for actual travel and the vicarious traveling that maps inspire. Beginning with service station maps and the maps that come with National Geographic magazines, Feathers built a world of paper continents, countries, and neighborhoods from Torrance to Timbuktu.

That world had its compensations -- the neatly gridded spaces on printed sheets, the ability to fold a whole landscape into one's pocket, the superman leaps any map allows. But that world had its demands, too. Collecting put Feathers deep in debt at times. At his death, the thousands of maps overwhelmed his home, flowed out of boxes and off shelves, and lay in piles. The paper world Feathers made ended in chaos. It was slated to be dumped as junk until Matthew Greenberg called Glen Creason.

Glen is now the Magellan of that almost lost world, already sorting and cataloging Feathers' maps so that they can become a useful part of the library's collection (expanding it to one of the largest in the nation).

We ought to lay aside the pathetic aspects of Feathers' story -- the daily arrival of UPS trucks with boxes of maps, the obsession with charting distant places that made Feathers' own home almost unlivable, the compulsions that prevented Feathers from seeing all the connections through time and space to which his maps might have guided him.

Better to linger over Feathers' maps, some with obvious collector value but many more thousands that are the perfectly ordinary maps of the places a liberated imagination might go. And now, with Glen's help, any of us can find our way there.

[Correction: an earlier version of this post incorrectly identified the collector of maps. His surname is Feathers.]

D. J. Waldie, author and historian, writes about Los Angeles twice each week at KCET's SoCal Focus blog.

Is it Day of the Dead or Día de los Muertos?

2012-11-02T17:52:37Z

A few days ago, as I do every year, I went into the attic and dug out a banker's box sized container of Día de los Muertos paraphernalia. The sugar skulls, the this, the that. The last few years the ritual has felt old and dusty, like the stuff in the bag. I put out the pictures, buy the marigolds, lay out some trinkets without a connection to the stuff. It's embarrassing because I've seen how deeply significant and personal an altar can be in the hands of people like L.A's Ofelia Esparza.

The Day of the Dead altar isn't a knee jerk thing for me. My mother was religious but she didn't create an altar in our house in Tijuana or San Diego. Dia de los Muertos was something you celebrated in the cemetery back in the old country. California Chicanos in the 1970s infused the traditions they saw in Mexico with a carnival-like atmosphere in arts centers and homes.

]]> My mother lives -- it feels like -- a world away in San Diego. I haven't visited my Mexican aunts in Tijuana in years, I haven't seen the Tijuana cousins my age in years either. I haven't been to Mexico City in nearly three years. I go through periods when I don't feel Mexican anymore.

Not this year. I climbed up the wood, folding ladder with a few lines I'd read the week before in a poem by Octavio Paz. From "Elegía interrumpida" ("Interrupted elegy").

Hoy recuerdo a los muertos de mi casa.
Al primer muerto nunca lo olvdidamos,
aunque muera de rayo, tan aprisa
que no alcance la cama ni los oleos.

Now I remember the dead of my own house.
We never forget the first among us dead,
though he was the one struck down, he died so fast
that nothing was there, no bed, no holy oils.
(New Directions, translation 1973)

The ancestors don't come out on November 2. They live in your house. They're with you if you want them there. I often explain away what feels like a tug at my shoulder as a brief muscular twitch or a surface skin spasm. Even though I see no one there, part of me wants to know that my grandfather, killed in his 20s in Guanajuato, or my other grandparents, may be touching my shoulder to let me know they're there. It's a good presence.

I haven't lived in a house where a family member has died. My mother did. In her hometown in Guanajuato wakes take place in living rooms.

Paz is writing about living in a house with the presence of his muertos, his family members who've died. That's the company I want to keep. My family's dead, Miguel, Lucha, Maria, Galo, Elias, Alicia, Pancho, Rupe, Gil, and lots others are a good bunch. I'll do my best to think about them and the love and pain they felt in life.

That's not what Halloween is about. I get the feeling that Dia de los Muertos as we're celebrating it now in Southern California is a bit like how All Hallows' Eve must have been celebrated 100 years ago, before the onslaught of Halloween commercialization. Enjoy.

Poet and KPCC Reporter Adolfo Guzman-Lopez writes his column Movie Miento every week on KCET's SoCal Focus blog. It is a poetic exploration of Los Angeles history, Latino culture and the overall sense of place, darting across LA's physical and psychic borders.

From Footpaths to the Grapevine: A Brief History of Southern California's Ridge Route

2012-11-02T00:52:43Z

Today, motorists traveling on Interstate 5 between Southern California and points north seemingly glide over the rugged San Gabriel and Tehachapi mountains. Navigating the gentle curves and easy grades along today's eight-lane highway -- once called the Ridge Route and today popularly known as the Grapevine -- gives little indication of the difficulty early travelers experienced in their journey between Southern California and the Central Valley.

]]> Motorists on the highway's first iteration, which opened to traffic in 1915, faced a daunting, 12-hour drive between Los Angeles and Bakersfield on a one-way, unpaved road. To save money by minimizing road cuts and bridges, a 36-mile stretch of the route traveled atop the mountain ridges between Castaic and Gorman. Slowed by a strictly enforced speed limit, drivers crawled around 697 curves at 15 miles per hour.

Today, most drivers would avoid such a road. But in a time when many took to the roads as a recreational pursuit, the Ridge Route -- a name that later came to be applied to the entire stretch between the Central Valley and San Fernando -- earned many admirers. A 1921 travel guide, "On Sunset Highways," raved:

No description or picture can give any idea of the stupendous grandeur of the panorama that unrolls before one as he traverses this marvelous road. Vast stretches of gigantic hills interspersed with titanic canyons--mostly barren, with reds and browns predominating--outrun the limits of one's vision...Any extended tour of California must surely include the Ridge Route.

Filling stations, restaurants, and other diversions appeared at waystations along the road.

Still, the highway was dangerous -- one precarious section in Grapevine Canyon became known as Dead Man's Curve -- and the views may have pleased tourists but hardly compensated for the time spent on the road by truck drivers and other regular users. The road also tested the mettle of the automobiles of the era; overheated engines and blown-out tires were a common occurrence.

Motorists got an alternative in 1933, when the state opened a new, three-lane highway that avoided the ridge top in favor of the canyon and gorges of Piru Creek. At the time considered the largest highway project in state history, the Ridge Route Alternate, later designated US-99, shaved 9 miles and 45 minutes off the original Ridge Route. Curves featured a minimum radius of 1000 feet, and the new road's lower elevation reduced the chance of snowfall.

The route of US-99 later became the basis for today's modern superhighway, which opened in 1970. Some portions of the original Ridge Route and its 1933 successor are still open to traffic today. Other parts are accessible only to hikers, who may struggle to find the concrete beneath the overgrown chaparral.

Historical Precursors

Notably, the section of the original Ridge Route from Castaic to Gorman followed a novel route; unlike most mountain highways, which follow the paths of Indian foot trails, wagon roads, and railways, the winding Ridge Route was invented by state highway commissioner N.D. Darlington and engineer W. Lewis Clark.

But other segments of the freeway's 45-mile route between Kern County and the San Fernando Valley owe their alignment to historical forerunners.

At its northern end, Grapevine Canyon has long provided a vital line of communication between Southern California and the Central Valley. The canyon rises from the plains of the great valley into the Tehachapi Mountains and up to Tejon Pass, following the seasonal cascades of Grapevine Creek. Many historical accounts credit Spanish soldier Pedro Fages as the route's trailblazer, but long before Europeans arrived, Chumash, Kitanemuk, and Yokut Indians used the canyon as a trading route. The Chumash village of Mat'apxwelxwel was situated at the canyon's mouth.

When Captain Fages did finally arrive in 1772, hot in pursuit of deserters from the Spanish army, he noted in his diary the canyon's abundance of wild grapes. Three decades later, a Spanish missionary named Jose Zalvidea also noticed the grapes and gave it the name La Canada de las Uvas (the Canyon of the Grapes), which later became Grapevine Canyon.

The canyon grew in importance as a transportation route under U.S. rule. In 1854, the U.S. Army founded Fort Tejon near the Tejon Pass as the headquarters of its First Dragoons. Four years later, the Butterfield Overland Mail route brought stagecoaches through the canyon.

The southern end of the freeway, where it rises from the San Fernando Valley, also traces historical routes. Intrepid Indian traders blazed a trail through this area to connect cismontane Southern California with the Antelope Valley. The trail crossed over a summit known today as Newhall Pass but which historically has been named Fremont Pass and San Fernando Pass, located near the present-day interchange of Golden State (I-5) and Antelope Valley (CA-14) freeways.

That ancient footpath eventually became a wagon road and in 1858 was incorporated into the Butterfield line, which extended north to San Francisco and east to St. Louis. Seeking to improve this important communications, the city of Los Angeles contracted with a rancher and former Indian Affairs superintendent named Edward F. Beale to improve the road. Between 1859 and 1865, Beale' army of Chinese laborers used picks, shovels, and dynamite to cut a 50-foot trench in the earth at the Newhall Pass. Though bypassed by modern-day roads, Beale's Cut long served as an important link between the San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valleys.

Many of the archives who contributed the above images are members of L.A. as Subject, an association of more than 230 libraries, museums, official archives, cultural institutions, and private collectors. Hosted by the USC Libraries, L.A. as Subject is dedicated to preserving and telling the sometimes-hidden stories and histories of the Los Angeles region. Our posts here provide a view into the archives of individuals and institutions whose collections inform the great narrative—in all its complex facets—of Southern California.

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Rescue Us: Neighborhoods and Bureaucracies

2012-11-01T22:55:00Z

Detail of a building facade at UCLA. | Photo: DonnaGrayson/Flickr/Creative Commons License

With the election and other potential trouble bearing down on us like superstorm Sandy, I was determined this week to write something nonpolitical and heartwarming -- i.e., the escape and subsequent rescue of my four dogs. On Monday evening the front door to my house was left wide open (we won't say who made that mistake) and the pooches eventually wandered out.

Thanks to a coordinated and sustained effort by several of my neighbors, one of whom is terrified of dogs but sprang into action by getting on the phone to her son in San Diego, all four beasts were corralled and returned home before I drove up. The one who had wandered furthest away is very leery of people and almost impossible to catch, but a quick-thinking neighbor boy followed her at a distance on his skateboard and then lured her back to the block by pretending he had treats in his pocket (he only had a wallet). About the only thing that can override Honey's fear is the possibility of food, and I'm grateful that my neighbor Lawrence intuited that. He's in high school and interested in becoming a zoologist; I'd say he's off to a good start.

After the crisis passed, I was struck by this demonstration of the quality of the community in which I live. I know I tend to be critical and even despairing about Inglewood and about the state of black folks, but this week I was reminded that sometimes that despair is merely academic. Thank goodness.

]]> That was the story to which I was going to dedicate the entire blog, but then affirmative action intervened. Again. Its likely fate is a chilling story -- nothing heartwarming here -- that just won't go away. Just two weeks ago I said my piece about the University of Texas case pending before the Supreme Court. But in the past several days I've received a flurry of frantic and indignant emails from fellow black UCLA alum about the latest attack on the admissions process at the university that claims race is being unfairly used as a factor.

The criticism is being levied by UCLA law professor Richard Sander who's just published an anti-affirmative book, "Mismatch." Sander is technically not anti-affirmative action -- he likes it, just not the kind that considers race into consideration, which is one way racial conservatives give themselves a kinder, more egalitarian face. The UCLA newspaper the Daily Bruin ran a sympathetic article about the book and its findings, and an even more sympathetic editorial about how the "illegal" use of race in the holistic admissions process must stop (it was followed up by a letter from the Editor this week).

So now black freshmen with stellar grades and test scores being admitted to a tax-supported institution of higher learning are "illegal," like undocumented immigrants. Looks like we're being relegated once again to second-class citizen status, not with "whites only" signs but with sophisticated book-length research that purports to want only what's best for us (actually, that kind of patronizing smells quite a bit like the whites-only rationale of old). Sander is one of a group of many people who, in my opinion, have been obsessed with keeping affirmative action gone in California ever since it was banned by proposition in 1996. You'd think they would have relaxed after that, but these folks have been on the watch for any scrap of evidence that black students are polluting the increasingly rarefied waters of UC, UCLA in particular -- after all, it's been the most applied-to university in the country several years running. They're policing the incidence of Latino admits, too, but make no mistake, it is the notion of black students getting over that is driving the vigilance.

I am getting very tired of people like Sander who sit up nights and years trying to prove that 300 colored freshman admitted out of a class of 10,000 is a social problem. He -- we -- need to look at it from the other end, to turn that outrage around 180 degrees. I have a story for Mr. Sander: I was an affirmative action admit to UCLA in 1979. Though I wasn't the valedictorian at my public high school, my grades and test scores more than qualified me. My letter didn't mention affirmative action, but that's what I assume. I didn't feel "less than" because of it. As one of a handful of black students in the English department at the time, I was isolated but stimulated enough by the material and by the whole experience to do well and to stay competitive; I swiftly figured out the game. One quarter, a famously tough professor of Restoration comedy cited my essay in class as an exemplary piece of critical thinking. I graduated on time with a more than decent GPA. I didn't go to law school, like the majority of English majors did, but I don't doubt I would have been accepted somewhere competitive and done well.

Even if this experience was the exception for black students back then -- as it might be now, as Sander suggests -- my success is a powerful argument for affirmative action, not against it. Again and again, anti-affirmative crusaders insist that AA is doing all of us harm, starting with the hapless colored misfits (or mismatches) who have been mistakenly given a chance to attend a university that they help support with their tax dollars, just like everyone else. I may be a misfit, but I am no mismatch. Though my belief in community and how we need to base policy around that belief is clearly out of step with the times, and has been for a while. I just hope that when my neighbor Lawrence applies to college to pursue his ambition in zoology, he gets exactly what he deserves.

Journalist and op-ed columnist Erin Aubry Kaplan's first-person accounts of politics and identity in Los Angeles, with an eye towards the city's African American community, appear every Thursday on KCET's SoCal Focus blog. Read all her posts here.

Distress Signal: Hurricane Sandy's Take-Away Message

2012-10-31T22:25:55Z

I never meant to be so predictive. In a column I wrote this summer about the extraordinary vulnerability of the Jersey Shore to the erosive force of hurricanes, a landscape that has been gouged, pummeled, and drowned by one swirling storm after another, I suggested it was so vulnerable because of Nature (Mother) and nature (human). Two months later, Hurricane Sandy underscored that claim.

]]> The region's legendary beach communities, notably Cape May, have been constructed on the least stable soil -- or in their case, sand -- a medium that by definition shifts, erodes, and migrates in response to tidal pressures. Hurricanes and tropical storms, even a solid nor'easter, accelerate these changes, particularly when their cyclonic force smacks into the built environment.

That's when things get ugly. And dangerous. The danger is a direct consequence of our hunger to stake out beachfront property, fill in tidal wetlands, dredge harbors and inlets, and flatten barrier sand dunes, all tied to our hardscape hubris, our touching faith that concrete, boulder, asphalt, and wood will make our homes, restaurants, and hotels stable, impregnable, enduring.

This confidence encourages a psychological comfort that is anything but comforting: on Sunday, as Hurricane Sandy bore down on southern New Jersey, police and firefighters went door-to-door pleading with people to evacuate. Gov. Chris Christie could not have been more blunt: "Don't be stupid."

Too many were, and chose to stay behind because, as one of them said after a harrowing rescue from his flooded home: "This is crazy; it's never happened before."

Actually, it has occurred before, and often, up and down the eastern seaboard, time and time again. Yet the extraordinary human capacity to deny this tempest-tossed past somehow trumps our ability to act in our self-defense. Apparently we'd rather put ourselves (and others) in harm's way than admit that world we have constructed along this fragile and malleable coast, from Miami to Maine, is as durable as a sandcastle.

Some of this odd behavior surely is a failure of imagination and memory, which might be countered by a more persistent and willful telling of stories about such momentous events. Might it help to spin an endless thread of remembrance so as to knit together past and present, to stop time as a way to remind us how to live in this time, in this place?

Such thoughts flickered through my mind 21 years ago as Hurricane Bob charged up the Atlantic, taking dead aim at New England. In mid-August my family and I had arrived on Martha's Vineyard Island, seven miles off Cape Cod, to visit my mother then living in a mid-century modern home perched on a sandy bluff overlooking Edgartown harbor; its board-and-batten siding and large plate-glass windows, ideal on a warm summer's day, were less so in the face of nature's fury.

Not that we were thinking such ominous thoughts as we motored down to the Cape from Boston, took a ferry across to the Vineyard, and another from Edgartown to Chappaquiddick Island, whose western shore helps frame the old whaling town's harbor. All was placid: the storm still lay well to the south; models of its path remained unpredictable.

Then the tropical depression intensified and took off like a shot; we could not get off the Vineyard before Bob's 100-mph winds and roiling tidal surge shut down access to the mainland. As day turned to night, as lightning flashed across an ink-black sky, we told stories to while away the hours; that's when our less-than-sleepy children learned about their father's first close encounter with a hurricane.

Not yet three when Carol smashed into the Vineyard in August 1954, I seemed to have spent most of that long day clinging to my mother; that was not the safest place to be. Hoping to give her children an unobstructed view of the storm's fury, for example, she took us to the upper story of our then-summer home, a colonial edifice located in Edgartown, on South Water Street (its name is not by happenstance), tentatively raising the skylight that gave access to the roof.

Flooding in downtown Edgartown after Hurricane Carol in 1954. | Photo: Courtesy Vineyard Gazette

Big mistake: when it sailed off into the roiling sky, I was clamped to Mom's hip. There I remained while a local handyman struggled to nail a tarpaulin over the gaping hole.

Then there was the eerie calm that afternoon as the "eye" passed over the island. Only my mother -- who grew up on the New England coast -- professed not to know this marked but a temporary lull; she promptly took us down the street to survey the damage. Of that there was plenty. Power lines lay draped over a forest of downed tree limbs and branches, a dangerous clutter through which we picked our way north to the red-brick library. An incredulous Alfred Hall, a local merchant, astonished at our naiveté, admonished my mother to get us back to safety. She did, just before the back end of Carol tore into the town with renewed ferocity.

Maybe those were not the most appropriate tales to tell Ben and Rebecca on the eve of their first hurricane, I realized after catching them sneak furtive glances at their grandmother. So I tried to assure them that Bob would give us a glancing blow at best. "Trust me," I urged. They smiled, warily. After all, the story they had just heard revealed me to be the kind of guy who happily went along for the ride.

They need not have been so skeptical. Bob acted as predicted, and we easily rode out its fierce winds. There were moments however when those shrieking gusts threatened to crack through the living room's expansive windows, but they stood firm, and through them we watched a bizarre incident unfold in the turbulent waters of the harbor below.

Tempestuous does not begin to capture the endless sweep of white-capped chop that rolled north from Katama Bay through Edgartown's Inner Harbor to pile onto the usually calm interior Chappaquiddick shoreline; a resounding drum of wet thunder. The churning bode ill for the many pleasure craft and yachts that had streamed into Edgartown in advance of the storm, hoping to find safe haven. They pitched, dunked, and rocked as if mere toys, and many either snapped their moorings or dislodged their anchors, to drift wherever wind and tide pushed them.

One of those that broke loose was the Moxie, a 30-foot, white-hulled sloop whose owner had found refuge next door. He must have kept his boat under close surveillance, for the moment we saw it spring free, a figure sprinted down the bluff stairs, slopped across the submerged dock and then leaped into the raging foam. Somehow he struggled aboard the errant, yawing vessel; somehow he kept his feet and manipulated the rear anchor so that it finally caught, bringing the Moxie to rest on the windward side of another dock, some three hundred yards to the north.

By this time we had edged out of the house to track the sailor's progress, and, crouching in the lee of a pine, watched as he repositioned the anchors, and lashed down the helm. His triumph was brief: within seconds of his return to shore, a wave lifted the Moxie and dropped it on to the splintering wharf, where it remained, wedged in and battered.

The Moxie could be rehabbed. Not so the family of Ospreys inhabiting a platform affixed to a nearby telephone pole, erected to help regenerate the once-prevalent species; its populations had been in steep decline since the 1950s with the widespread use of DDT that compromised its reproductive capacities. The day before the storm, we had observed a set of indefatigable parents demonstrate the tricky dynamics of flight to two juveniles while constantly feeding their ravenous brood. This peaceful avian life came to halt with the first rush of a southerly gale: it swept away their nest, a seemingly sturdy tangle of brush and twigs. The next morning, after the winds had subsided, we spotted an immature Osprey perched on the empty platform, calling for parents that never came, a plaintive cry repeated from dawn to dusk. By week's end, the young hawk had vanished.

It was hard not to recall that wrenching moment of loss as Hurricane Sandy's monstrous waves slammed into the Vineyard's southern shore, its screaming winds sheared off roofs in upscale beach towns on Long Island, its floodwaters made Manhattan's homeless only more so, and its punitive energy punched through and swamped the Jersey Shore. All habitats are vulnerable.

The instinct will be to rebuild, repair, and regenerate, an understandable impulse to cover up and gloss over. That's the last thing that should happen. Leave some of Sandy's tattered remnants -- busted boardwalks, beached boats, eroded strand, the cracked and broken -- so that we have some palpable memorials, visible markers of its distressing legacy.

Maybe then we won't forget what to do the next time a hurricane howls over the horizon.

Parts of this article were first published by Char Miller in the Vineyard Gazette in 1995.

Char Miller is the Director and W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College, author of "Public Lands, Public Debates: A Century of Controversy" (Oregon State University Press), and editor of "Cities and Nature in the American West." He comments every week on environmental issues. Read more of his columns here

Ketchup, Mustard, and All Things Egalitarian

2012-10-30T17:00:00Z

A table setting at Hearst Castle. | Photo: Averain/Flickr/Creative Commons License

It is a pleasing visual, a paper boy seated beside Winston Churchill, perhaps tapping him delicately on the sleeve, perhaps giving a polite cough, certainly cinching up a bit with apprehension, seated beside one of the most important statesman of the time. But need often circumvents fear. Mr. Churchill, would you please pass the ketchup?

"Ketchup and mustard on a 17th century table from Italy," chuckles Jim Allen. "That's old world and new world, isn't it?"

It is, and it's more than that, too. Allen and I stand in the long dining room at Hearst Castle, aforementioned 17th century table stretching to the horizon beneath ceilings that scrape the heavens. William Randolph Hearst did few things small. Did I mention the dining table stops short of a fireplace originally constructed about the same time Columbus sailed for France?

]]> For reasons beyond good fortune, I have been afforded a back door tour of Hearst Castle with Allen as my guide. Touring Hearst Castle with Jim Allen is a bit like wandering backstage with Mick Jagger. Currently the Castle's director of marketing, Allen has been at Hearst Castle for 29 years. Better still, this hasn't dimmed the man's enthusiasm one bit. As we stand in the vast dining hall, Allen provides an animated discourse on the adjacent Assembly Room where guests like Charles Lindbergh, Howard Hughes, Greta Garbo, and Charlie Chaplin gathered to hobnob before dinner. The guest list at the newspaper magnate's dinner parties comprised a who's who of statesmen, movie stars, scientists, explorers, and, my personal favorite, paper boys.

As Allen talks I bob my head in the universal sign of rapt attention, but I confess I only half listen. Gazing at the long table, set as if for dinner tonight, it's not hard to imagine the paper boy squirting ketchup willy-nilly about his plate while beside him Churchill employs all his diplomatic skills to refrain from looking horrified.

So young fellow, are you enjoying the pommes de terre à la sarladaise?
The potatoes taste a little funny to me, sir.
Ah. Well yes. I suppose they might. They are roasted in duck fat.
They're kind of like French fries.
Yes, I suppose they are. We call them chips in England.
Chips are better with ketchup, sir.
Mmmmm. When you're done with that, I'll have a dollop myself.

Of course I am making all this up. The conversation between Winston Churchill and a San Francisco Chronicle paperboy could have gone in any imaginable direction. Lord knows the repartee exchanged between Howard Hughes and Harpo Marx. But the point is clear. William Randolph Hearst amassed enough wealth to do things Donald Trump can't even imagine, but at heart the man was egalitarian.

Here in the dining hall, Allen has fallen quiet, too. Perhaps he is hearing conversations of his own. Finally he gives an affirmative nod. "Hearst broke down social strata," he says. "He was definitely a Californian."

Allen continues the tour. We wander past crystalline swimming pools, marble columns, secret doors, delicate flowers, and towering palms, the products of a man whose vision brought to fruition a home one part ranch, one part European castle upon a granite hilltop that required every shovel of topsoil be shipped in. Hearst's collection of artifacts is beyond comprehension; the grandeur of the buildings in which they are housed, equally so. The estate's main house, aptly named Casa Grande, has 38 bedrooms, 30 fireplaces, 14 sitting rooms and 42 bathrooms, neatly highlighting man's priorities. Said rooms are brimming with Spanish and Italian furniture, Oriental carpets, Renaissance vestments, Flemish tapestries, third century Roman mosaics, Egyptian statures, Greek vases, and Tiffany lamps. Believe me, you walk with your elbows tucked in (although Harpo Marx purportedly did somersaults in the library with actress Marion Davies). The grounds are trod by zebras. Tim Burton has less imagination. As Allen succinctly puts it, "Most people don't tour through here and say, 'Who cares?'''

Yes, Hearst's Castle is opulence beyond scope, yet the man himself possessed a hearty lack of pretense. Purportedly Hearst's 1919 instructions to famed San Francisco architect Julia Morgan were straightforward. "Miss Morgan, we are tired of camping out in the open at the ranch in San Simeon and I would like to build a little something."

William Randolph Hearst certainly had his critics. His newspapers and his reporters were accused of routinely inventing sensational stories, faking interviews, and running phony pictures, beating some of today's news outlets to the punch by a hundred years. Like many wealthy personages, he could sometimes be out of touch. He once dispatched a reporter to the Ojai Valley to capture a wild grizzly to be named Monarch, in keeping with his newspaper's logo, "Monarch of the Dailies."

But historians always quibble about the famous after the fact. In my mind, the fact which matters is simple, simmering beneath the flamboyant life and stunning acquisitions of William Randolph Hearst like a steady flame. Hearst built his fortune on newspapers and the belief that those inky pages were the underpinning of a free and open democracy. He peopled his dinner table in the same fashion.

There is much to be said for a place where a paperboy can advise a head of state on matters of seasoning and taste. We could use more of that in this world today.

Ken McAlpine is a three-time Lowell Thomas award-winner. His most recent book is "Fog," praised by one critic as "one of the most intelligent, richly detailed, deeply felt and evocative novels I've read." He writes weekly on KCET's SoCal Focus blog about Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

Fixing auto shop for a 'car skeptical' generation

2012-10-29T21:00:00Z

| Photo: Lester Public Library| Flickr: Creative Commons License

My brother trained to be high school auto shop teacher. He had been taking things apart and putting together since he was two years old. By the time he was 18, he had advanced from fixing bicycles to powered lawn mowers to putting new engines in semi-junked cars.

By the time he was 20, he was building dune buggies in our backyard from the belly pans of wrecked VWs. He could make anything motorized run again.

But my brother never became a shop teacher. The field shrank around him as he graduated from college and took the required education courses. He never taught. He retired not long ago after many years of owning his own garage.

]]> My brother's skills and his education made a good life for him during a time of accelerating change in the way cars were built. By necessity (and with considerable aptitude), my brother became as good with computers as he already was with motors.

I was drafted as my brother's unwilling helper for most his backyard years, picking up a modest education in auto mechanics. I learned how to gap spark plugs, bleed brakes, and time an engine. If the car you drive was made before 1970, I can replace your alternator or water pump.

Cars since then aren't built the same. And the innards of tomorrow's cars - hybrid or all electric or alternatively fueled, increasingly internally and externally networked - will be even less available to a kid smelling of carburetor cleaner and brake fluid. Car engines don't have carburetors any more, do they?

School districts in California - out of economy and misplaced priorities - began abandoning auto shop programs when my brother sought a career in teaching. Now, some school districts are bringing shop classes back. But I wonder about their value.

Certainly, there is work for auto mechanics after graduation. Fixing your car is one job that can't be out-sourced (although an engine diagnostic can be sent to a computer screen in Mumbai as easily to one in Manhattan Beach). And some college bound students learn better when the principles of physics or geometry are taught in conjunction with things they can do with their hands. It's even likely that a few students, failing in a college oriented curriculum, will find useful lessons in the workings of a crankshaft, in the hydraulics of a brake line, in the orderliness of a machine.

But our chaotic educational policies don't offer much for students whose work will always be with their hands, as my brother's work was. Thousands of jobs requiring both manual and technical skills are unfilled in an otherwise miserable job market because we don't have an educational system that responds to those needs.

High school auto shop might be a gateway to one of those good-paying jobs for that kind of student, but it seems unlikely.

There's even something retrograde in advising students to get under the hood of a car, like offering courses in tobacco farming or journalism. As the Los Angeles Times reported, when the students in Belmont High's auto shop gutted a donated VW, they didn't install a rebuilt transaxle; they wired the car with an electric motor and batteries. That was as much a lesson in adaptability as it was in auto mechanics.

Young adults don't fetishize cars the way my brother and his high school buddies did. Among "smart growth" and alternative transportation activists, the private auto is a fearsome thing, and having one is akin to owning your own nuclear reactor.

Today's youth may prefer to see themselves in a car-free future, riding public transit to work, walking, or commuting by bike. Perhaps school districts should skip auto shop for bicycle repair.

D. J. Waldie, author and historian, writes about Los Angeles twice each week at KCET's SoCal Focus blog.

Do Ballot Initiatives Foster the Darker Side of Political Spending?

2012-10-29T18:00:00Z

Photo: Renee Silverman/Flickr/Creative Commons License

Californians will soon go to the polls to weigh in on no less than eleven ballot initiatives. These initiatives could change the law on everything from the death penalty to the labeling of food.

I have previously written here about the pitfalls of the initiative process. This mechanism of direct democracy, designed to guard against the power special interests held over our elected officials, is now similarly controlled by special interests. Money is the driving factor behind which proposals qualify for the ballot.

]]> Large sums are spent not only to pay signature gatherers to get proposals placed on the ballot but also to support or oppose those measures once they qualify for the ballot. One need only to open the mailbox or certain websites, or turn on the television or radio, to see the enormous amounts of money being spent to attempt to sway voters on these eleven initiatives.

Last week I wrote about a large donation, $11 million to be exact, given by an Arizona non-profit corporation to two ballot measure committees in California.

This post is, in part, an update on events that occurred last week. Currently members of the voting public only know that a group called "Americans for Responsible Leadership" donated that large sum to a committee opposing Proposition 30 and supporting Proposition 32. Proposition 30 is Governor Jerry Brown's tax initiative. The initiative would raise income taxes on high wage earners and sales taxes for all and put that increased revenue towards public education. (I previously discussed Prop 30 here) Proposition 32, while styled as good government reform, is in fact an effort to reduce the political power of unions in California. (I wrote about Prop 32 here).

Other than the name of the organization, the place it "resides," and the committees to which it donated money, the public knows little to nothing about Americans for Responsible Leadership. In an effort to give the public vitally important information about the identity of this organization, the State's political watchdog organization, the Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) sued the organization.

The court held a quick procedural hearing last week, and will hold a hearing on the merits of the case next week, one week before the election. It remains to be seen whether the public will obtain information about this group before the election. I am, however, hopeful that this experience and the quick actions by the FPPC will prevent this scenario from repeating election after election.

Jessica Levinson writes about the intersection of law and government every Monday. She is an Associate Clinical Professor at Loyola Law School. Read more of her posts here.

Coming Out of the (Republican) Closet

2012-10-26T23:00:00Z

About two weeks ago, I met up with three old friends from college. Every so often we get together, order large amounts of food and wine, which we never seem to finish due to the topic du jour, and discuss old professors, current affairs, and everything in between. During this particular Saturday evening, while four young gay men waited patiently for an assortment of what my friend Tony would call "rugged non-umbrella drinks," the news of my recent and not so devastating unemployment status -- the two-hour commute that eventually wore me down -- catapulted the conversation toward politics, as it pertains to the devastated economy and upcoming Presidential Election.

There we were feeling so united and politically savvy. I was creatively throwing out at every ten-dollar word I had heard Anderson Cooper use the night before when all of a sudden it happened. My good friend, Robby, an active participant in most if not all of our on-campus civil and gay rights campaigns, a future non-profit leader and development protégé, says in very cool, calm, and collected manner, "I think Romney is the answer we've been looking for." Forks dropped, eyes widened, a gasp could be heard from three blocks away, and I'm almost certain that the explosion of dropped, dirty dishes in the back wasn't a coincidence.

]]> Being the bravest and most vocal of the group, Jason, an ethnic-studies and economics major and now a very successful consultant, looks Robert square in the eye and says, "Come again?" I being the most confused followed up with, "You're Republican now?" for which he replied "Yes." Robert had apparently been politically conservative since before his junior year of high school. "How could this be headline news?" I wondered. Contrary to popular belief Robert was secure with his identity: openly gay, passionate and compassionate about every important cause and living thing, African American, and Republican. By the time my Mahi Mahi landed in front of me, my curiosity had ruined my appetite. I couldn't help but wonder why Republican?

Some may respond, why not?

Robert's view was that LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender) conservatives believe that there are far greater issues to deal with. Issues that affect us as Americans, as parents, serviceman, and educators. Issues which, in their opinion, aren't necessarily being tackled by our current President effectively or efficiently, one of which being the economy.

In a recent press release the L.C.R (Log Cabin Republicans), an organization that promotes equality for the LGBT community by way of Republican policy, states, "If LGBT issues are a voter's highest or only priority, then Governor Romney may not be that voter's choice. However, Log Cabin Republicans is an organization representing multifaceted individuals with diverse priorities."

After our food had cooled and glasses had dried, we all, reluctantly, agreed that we had never thought of it that way. And, although I respect all of my friends' opinions and admire groups like the L.C.R and GOProud, another political organization representing gay conservatives, for having the ability to see beyond their own civil rights and desires for marriage equality (at least for now), I still, like many of my peers, find their affiliation to the Republican Party to be a hard pill to swallow. Especially in the wake of the much publicized boycott of the GOProud organization from the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Still, during the drive home I wondered how many of my views were misguided and perhaps outdated? Was I a Democrat out of habit and environment, or common sense? Why was Robby's explanation taking up so much vital space in my mind? Either way, gay or straight, conservative or liberal, nearly every American will have the right to have their political opinion heard in the upcoming Presidential election, November 6, and I'm sure by the next time we all get together it will make for yet another interesting conversation, to say the least.

Brandon Kyle is a Inland Empire-based writer, grad student, and events coordinator.

Being Read by James Franco

2012-10-26T21:00:00Z

| Photo: D.J. Waldie

The filmmaker James Franco has been writing about a book of mine that Franco's students at CalArts in Valencia will spend this semester and the next turning into an assemblage of short films. This is supposed to add up to something, rather like the book was supposed to.

I'm not against interpretation (having been badly trained -- my own fault, really -- in critical theory). It's just that it's weird when interpretation happens to you (and even stranger when it joins, if only peripherally, celebrity culture).

]]> There's an unpleasant history of writers (or a writer's heirs) manipulating interpreters, attempting to control the afterlife of the writer as if that were possible or desirable. My book -- written nearly 20 years ago -- is nearly as foreign to me as it is to the 20-some-year-olds who were hardly in elementary school then. The book's author is someone I used to know quite well, but we've drifted apart over the years. He was (as I've said before) more angry, more outraged than I am now.

If I'm forced to interpret him, then he's fair game for anyone else, including James Franco and his class of film students.

It may be saying too much that "Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir" is an argument, specifically about the meaning of "place" in our lives together. But I thought that's what I was making -- the argument that people and places have a reciprocal shaping power, that things-in-themselves, as I've said before, receive our touch and return one of their own mingled with ours.

Franco, writing about "Holy Land" in his blog at the Huffington Post, calls the book's effects elusive -- perhaps not the best form of an argument. He notes that the book is fragmentary -- and it is. Hard to grasp and disconnected is not the kind of argument that would win over a jury.

You would think that film, which is itself impressionistic and fragmentary, would be the right medium through which an elusive narrative could be interpreted, that film, which is crowded with the presence of everyday things, is in sympathy with the idea that ordinariness matters. I have my doubts.

Franco has said that one of his intentions as a filmmaker is to find ways of translating poetry into film. Translating may show Franco (as it did me) the truth of Wallace Fowlie's assertion that poems endure in their own words the dangers of overstatement and misstatement until, in their final form after the poet's death, they attain a fixed and permanent life, unalterable, beyond disaster. At which point the poem becomes untranslatable (even as the poet's words enter our common speech).

"Holy Land" is half into this afterlife already, into which a collection of student films will propel it a little further, unsuspected, I think, by James Franco.

D. J. Waldie, author and historian, writes about Los Angeles twice each week at KCET's SoCal Focus blog.

SoCal's Devil Winds: The Santa Anas in Historical Photos and Literature

2012-10-25T23:00:00Z

Dormant since spring, the Santa Ana winds howled back to life this week throughout the L.A. area. Triggering allergies, fraying nerves, and alarming fire-prone communities, the winds have long been a fact of life in Southern California -- the unadvertised price residents pay for the region's otherwise idyllic weather. And though the winds -- which arrive in the fall, peak in December, and depart in the spring -- are invisible to photographers' lenses, cameras have recorded the destruction this recurrent weather phenomenon has wrought throughout the region's history.

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More L.A. as Subject

Snow in Los Angeles

Earth, Water, Air, Fire: A Historical Look at SoCal's Troubled Relationship with Nature

Browse through all of L.A. as Subject's posts Southern California usually sits in a delicate climatic balance. On one side, the chilly waters of the Pacific, transported from Alaska via the California current, stabilize air temperatures and provide a ready source of moisture. On the other, a palisade of mountains blocks the extremes of the desert from coastal communities.

The Santa Anas upset that balance, ushering in hot, dry, desert-like conditions. But while the Santa Anas are often called desert winds, the term is misleading; the winds are not simply blowing desert air over Southern California's coastal plain. Instead, Santa Anas result from a cool, dry air mass that hovers over the continental interior of the American West. When that air descends from the higher-elevation basins to sea level, it warms and becomes even drier. (A similar phenomenon, termed a föhn wind, warms Central Europe.) Funneled through the Cajon and San Gorgonio passes, the moving air gains speed and destructive power.

Local lore offers several competing explanations for how the winds got their name.

One holds that the name finds its provenance in an Indian word for wind, which Spanish missionaries, detecting an evil presence in the winds, liked for its homonymy with "Satan." Another claims a saintly rather than devilish origin of the name -- while camping in present-day Orange County in 1769, the Portola expedition supposedly encountered a fierce windstorm on Saint Ann's Day. Yet another suggests Mexican dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna as the winds' eponym.

Scholars who have looked into the name's origins generally agree that it derives from Santa Ana Canyon, the portal where the Santa Ana River -- as well as a congested Riverside (CA-91) Freeway -- leaves Riverside County and enters Orange County. When the Santa Anas blow, winds can reach exceptional speeds in this narrow gap between the Puente Hills and Santa Ana Mountains.

Winds were ferocious in Santa Ana Canyon on the night of January 6, 1847, when U.S. forces under Commodore Robert Stockton camped near the canyon during their conquest of Los Angeles. Stockton's diary describes their ordeal:

Taking advantage of a deep ditch for one face of the camp, it was laid off in a very defensible position between the town and the river, expecting the men would have an undisturbed night's rest...In this hope we were mistaken. The wind blew a hurricane (something unusual in this part of California), and the atmosphere was filled with particles of fine dust, so that one could not see and but with difficulty breathe.

If the windstorm Stockton and his troops endured was the source of the name, little evidence exists in the historical record. Subsequent written descriptions lacked the winds' distinctive name, referring to them simply as "northeasters." It was not until 1880 -- nearly 37 years after Stockton jotted down his observations -- that the earliest known written use of the name "Santa Ana" appeared in an article in the Los Angeles Evening Express.

Whatever the origins of their name, the winds have made memorable appearances in the region's literature.

In "Two Years Before the Mast," Richard Henry Dana recounts a "violent northeaster" in 1836 that forced his ship, the Pilgrim, to leave its anchorage in San Pedro and seek refuge in the leeside of Santa Catalina Island.

In his memoir, "Sixty Years in Southern California," the Jewish-German Angeleno Harris Newmark recalls an 1865 windstorm that "struck Los Angeles amidships, unroofing many houses and blowing down orchards."

Agriculture dominated the Southern California landscape for much of its history, and
the prospect of Santa Ana winds haunted farmers and orange growers. When the winds came, they destroyed crops and suffocated urbanized areas with dust -- a phenomenon that fed the growing misconception of Los Angeles as a desert.

In John Fante's "Ask the Dust," Arturo Bandini looks out the window of his Bunker Hill apartment and observes a palm tree, "its crusted trunk choked with dust and sand that blew in from the Mojave and Santa Ana deserts."

By the time Raymond Chandler captured the winds in his 1938 story "Red Wind," they menaced not only crops but civil order, as well:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that, every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband's necks. Anything can happen.

Joan Didion picked up where Chandler left off in the 1965. Her "Los Angeles Notebook," later collected in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," is perhaps the classic literary treatment of the Santa Ana winds:

The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.
...[T]he violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and find Nathan Masters on Twitter and Google+.

When a Photo Isn't Worth a Thousand Words

2012-10-25T21:30:38Z

" src="http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/endeavour-cut-down-trees-2.jpg" width="600" height="398" class="mt-image-none" style="" />

I have to confess, I didn't join in the two-day festivities that attended the space shuttle Endeavour on its recent snail's-pace trek from the airport to its destination at the California Space Center near USC. As I wrote in an earlier post, I was far too miffed about the hundreds of trees in Inglewood and South Central that were flattened -- in alarmingly short order -- over the summer in order to make the whole street event possible. Now that the champagne's been popped, the shuttle has landed, and everybody's gone home, the six-mile median along Manchester running from Airport Boulevard to Crenshaw Drive in Inglewood is totally bare, one pretty depressing sight among others that will last a whole lot longer than two days. Talk about a hangover.

]]> That said, I didn't have anything against people's enthusiasm for the arrival of the shuttle itself. I was glad that locals turned out in droves, lining the streets and piling on tops of roofs on a blazing afternoon to watch a bit of scientific history passing through their midst. I'm glad that in this culture of celebrity gawking and top-this technology, people seemed truly wonderstruck by the sight of an inanimate object that, for all its size, was really nothing fancy and more than a little beat up. I was glad that our sense of imagination and possibility is still stirred by something other than the prospect of the next smart phone.

The photo that ran on the front-page of the L.A. Times can also be seen in their blog, Framework, here. | Screenshot: Framework/L.A. Times/

But none of that feeling was reflected in the front-page photo the L.A. Times ran on Oct. 14, the day after the event. Prominently featured in the shot was not the shuttle, but two black boys nonchalantly shooting hoops in their backyard as the enormous shuttle rolled by in the background. A funny contrast, I thought at first. Kind of irresistible for a lead picture. But when I read the coverage and realized how much genuine interest and good will there had been toward the shuttle's arrival, I got annoyed. The photo of two young black men playing basketball, totally indifferent to everything else -- I could imagine that same photo with a wildfire burning behind these guys -- not only misrepresented the event, it reinforced a stereotypical notion that black youth care chiefly about sports, with things like science way off the radar. True, there were smaller shots inside the paper of the parade throngs, but they had nowhere near the impact of that cover image. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a cover shot is worth more than fifty satellites; like the headline of a story, it sets the tone.

Two people I know who were equally annoyed by the basketball photo were Hal and Bettye Walker, who run the African-American Male Achievers Network (AMAN) and the International Science Discovery and Learning Center on La Brea Avenue in Inglewood. Hal is a scientist and inventor who helped design lunar ranging equipment used in the first moonwalk in 1969; his contributions are documented in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Bettye is a veteran educator and administrator who founded A-MAN as a way to actively counter the crisis of academic and social achievement among black males in L.A. schools. Together the Walkers have successfully run the after-school science center, which introduces students to science and space technology, for over 20 years. The Endeavour event was a natural for their outfit, and they were among the key speakers at the big rally held in the Forum parking lot, the shuttle's main stop. Present at the rally were lots of very excited kids from the Science Center and elsewhere. Where, the Walkers asked me, were those pictures?

If they were taken, they didn't make the cut at the Times, the paper of record. So here is one. For the record.

Santa Ana Sucker Wins One Against Inland Empire Water Agencies

2012-10-24T22:30:50Z

Santa Ana Sucker, Catostomus santaanae, Paul Barrett, USFWS

The Santa Ana Sucker, a Southern California native fish that's listed as Threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), got a bit of a break this week in U.S Federal Court in its namesake city, as a judge tossed out a lawsuit on Monday by several Inland Empire water agencies who wanted protections for the fish overturned.

The suit by Riverside County Flood Control & Water Conservation District, the San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District, and ten other agencies sought to have an expansion of designated critical habitat for the fish thrown out, claiming that the modest protection afforded by the designation would cause catastrophic economic damage to the Inland Empire area.

]]> The Santa Ana sucker is a smallish, olive-drab fish six inches long at most that eats algae in rocky pools on Southern California rivers. Originally found throughout the Santa Ana, San Gabriel, and Los Angeles River watersheds, it's now found in just a few stretches of stream -- mainly on the Santa Ana River, but also in some stretches of the San Gabriel River and Big Tujunga Creek.

The sucker is in trouble because we've radically altered the streams it lives in and the watersheds that support them. The fish evolved to cope with the highly seasonal flows of Southern California streams, which can nearly dry up in summer and fall to become dangerous torrents in the rainy season. Many freshwater fish have trouble coping with such irregular flows, which can scour out habitat and then strand fish in declining pools. Santa Ana suckers have lived for millennia in these conditions that would prevent other fish from thriving.

Not unlike trout in more constant streams, suckers spawn in gravel beds under clear-flowing stretches, grow through their larval stages in stream channels shaded by vegetation, and shelter as adults in deep pools on the upstream sides of boulders. Flood control dams and channelization destroy the natural stream cycles that have maintained sucker habitat in Southern California streams, and the fish's population has crashed as a result: the species' numbers are now around 5% what they were in the 1970s.

One of the biggest blows to the Santa Ana sucker was the construction in the 1990s of the Seven Oaks Dam, a flood control project on the Santa Ana River in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains. That dam dried up seasonal flooding on the river downstream, devastating the sucker's habitat.

The sucker was listed as Threatened by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) in 2000. USFWS suggested designating more than 20,000 acres in Southern California as critical habitat for the fish in 2004, but slashed that to 8,305 acres in 2005 under pressure from developers and water agencies. The environmental group Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) filed suit in 2007 to expand that designation, and USFWS and CBD reached a settlement in 2010 to add a bit more than 1,000 acres to the fish's designated critical habitat. It's that settlement that water agencies sued to overturn in 2011, and it's that 2011 suit that was tossed out by U.S. District Judge James V. Selna on Monday in Santa Ana.

It's worth taking a look at this point at just what it was the water agencies were objecting to. Under the ESA, federal agencies can designate critical habitat for species listed as Endangered or Threatened in order to enhance the possibility of recovery of the species. critical habitat includes areas thought to be crucial to the continued existence of the species, and may include areas where the species does not currently exist.

Despite frequent complaints from industry about overreaching in critical habitat designation, the agencies drawing up critical habitat for a species -- USFWS for terrestrial and most freshwater species, and NOAA Fisheries for marine and anadromous species -- are required by law to consider economic impacts as they draw their maps.

Though opponents often describe critical habitat designation as the federal government "locking up land," the protections designation offers are actually rather meager. Critical habitat designation has no effect whatsoever on projects with no federal involvement -- that is, projects on private or non-federal public land that aren't being paid for with federal funds. As Fish and Wildlife says in a fact sheet on critical habitat:

Only activities that involve a Federal permit, license, or funding, and are likely to destroy or adversely modify the area of critical habitat will be affected. If this is the case, we will work with the Federal agency and, where appropriate, private or other landowners to amend their project to allow it to proceed without adversely affecting the critical habitat. Thus, most Federal projects are likely to go forward, but some will be modified to minimize harm to critical habitat.

In other words, critical habitat designation doesn't impede developers or their allies from increasing their bank balances to the detriment of endangered species: it merely puts some limits on how easily they can use your federal tax dollars to help them do it.

Reaction to the dismissal from the water agencies was swift. "We are obviously troubled by the court's decision, which appears to give free reign to federal agencies to interpret scientific information how they see fit, regardless of the inconsistencies, contradictions, omissions or gaps in the data they use to support their arguments," said Douglas Headrick of the San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District. Headrick criticized the decision as support for USFWS' kowtowing to CBD -- ironic given that CBD's role essentially consisted of restoring less than a tenth of the acreage cut in the USFWS' kowtowing to water agencies.

The water agencies are concerned that they may be "forced to maintain stream flows" to support the Santa Ana sucker's habitat. That complaint is telling. You could just as easily phrase that as "prevented from taking quite so much water away from the fish in the first place."

It's worth noting that the Orange County Water District (OCWD), which occupies the downstream end of the Santa Ana River and accounts for more than 700 acres of the Santa Ana sucker's critical habitat, didn't join in the lawsuit challenging the minor critical habitat expansion. "We've been able to work collaboratively with the Fish and Wildlife Service," Greg Woodside of OCWD's planning and natural resources department, told the Orange County Register's Pat Brennan last year. "We did not see this as a problem for us."

The O.C. is hardly a hotbed of radical environmentalism, and its water companies are not above proposals to take water away from wildlife for us in lawn sprinkling. And thus the San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District and its 11 fellow litigants might consider this: when you stake out a position on an environmental issue that puts an Orange County water agency on more or less the same side as the Center for Biological Diversity, you are most definitely doing it wrong.

Chris Clarke is an environmental writer of two decades standing. Director of Desert Biodiversity, he writes from Joshua Tree regularly at his acclaimed blog Coyote Crossing and comments on desert issues on KCET weekly. Read his recent posts here.

Large, Undisclosed Sums Given to Support or Defeat California Ballot Initiatives

2012-10-23T21:34:00Z

Photo: CoffeePartyUSA/Flickr/Creative Commons License

The outcome of 11 ballot initiatives on the November 6 statewide ballot hangs in the balance. One thing is already clear: The amount of money being given and spent to urge members of the electorate to vote "yes" or "no" on these measures is significant. A report published last week puts the amount of money given in favor of and against ballot measures at almost $300 million.

]]> And this money is not divided evenly among the eleven ballot measures. A number of wealthy individuals have given large sums to support certain ballot measures. Attorney Molly Munger, for instance, has given almost $33 million in support of her proposed ballot initiative, Proposition 38, which would raise the income tax on most Californians and put that increased revenue into the public school system. (For more on it and and the competing proposition, Prop 30, read this article on KCET's Ballot Brief.)

It is important to note that the $300 million figure reflects money given to ballot measure committees more than two weeks before the election. We can only expect that figure to rise as the election nears (Ballot Brief updates who's funding what a couple times a week. Keep track here).

Because of a number of Supreme Court decisions, the amount of money spent to get voters to vote "yes or "no" on ballot measures (not to mention to elect or defeat candidates) is unlikely to ebb. At least in the short term, it seems likely that the only way to regulate money flowing throughout the political marketplace will be to disclose the source and use of that money.

But last week a non-profit group based in Arizona gave $11 million to committees supporting or opposing two California ballot initiatives. From my perspective, the problem is that we know very little about this group. If, as the Supreme Court says, money is the equivalent of speech, then the identity of the speaker is vitally important. It is human nature to weigh an argument based on the identity of the speaker. Such information helps people to determine why an individual or entity would spend large sums concerning ballot measures. Without proper disclosure, the electorate is left only with the message funded by such donations, but not the source of that message.

In California, the Fair Political Practices Commission, the state's watchdog organization, has taken and is continuing to take steps to shed light on this so-called "dark money." My hope is that in California and in the rest of the country that large and largely untraceable campaign spending will soon by a thing of the past.

Jessica Levinson writes about the intersection of law and government every Monday. She is an Associate Clinical Professor at Loyola Law School. Read more of her posts here.

The Dog In The Road

2012-10-23T18:30:46Z

Photo: A.J. Baldbard/Flickr/Creative Commons License

There's no helplessness quite like the kind a dog can engender in you. Gold-flecked eyes shot through with pain burned into mine, the message as clear as anything could be on a night that dark. "Please fix this. I'll be good." But I couldn't fix it. I could only stand there, on the white line in the middle of the two-lane desert road, and hope the oncoming cars saw me in my dark clothing in time to slow and swerve around us.

]]> I never learned the dog's gender. I didn't want to move her. Let's just go with "her." She was a good dog, a chocolate lab, who'd been running through the Joshua trees with a friend and crossed the road at the wrong moment. No tags. No collar. But she was sleek, and clean, and though she suddenly could not get off the pavement, was in obvious pain, and suddenly surrounded by strange people in the dark she neither growled nor snapped. When there were no cars oncoming I knelt beside her, stroked her head, told her she was a good dog and that help would be there soon and that everything would be okay. She lifted her head toward me. A thin trace of blood ran from her muzzle to her left foreleg.

I got there a couple of minutes after she'd been hit. The kind young man whose pickup truck she'd run in front of was there, talking to her and pacing, beside himself in the aftermath of the accident. He wore his guilt and worry like a cloak. She was lying in my lane. I stopped, rolled my window down, and he asked who he should call. When I got out to help direct traffic around the dog his relief was palpable.

Alta Loma Road is the main alternative road through Joshua Tree. It's narrow and dark, and people regularly surpass 65 miles per hour along its less-developed stretches. I drive it every day, nearly. I constantly feel squeezed between the bright, insistent lights in the rear-view and the possibility of a sudden flash of eyes and fur in front of me trying to get from one copse of creosote to the one across the road. Some of that insistent traffic is almost certainly Angelenos taking the shortest route to the National Park; most of it is probably blase locals in a hurry to get home. Once we strap ourselves into our cars the outside world doesn't matter as much. It becomes a simulacrum, not all that real, and we speed past it without much thought for the consequences.

Except when those consequences end up staring into your eyes, pleading with you to do something, promising to be good.

I will say this for my neighbors in Joshua Tree: more of them stopped to help than I'd expect in most other places I've lived. Within about ten minutes another local pulled over to help direct traffic, a friend of the young man with the pickup truck. Fifteen minutes after that two women, apparently a mother and teenaged daughter, pulled off the road and tended as best they could to the dog. The young woman was dressed as if she'd just returned from a dance class, and her bright reflective white leotard probably did more than anything else the rest of us did to keep that dog safe. The rest of us were dressed in dark desert drab, and even with four vehicles pulled over with flashers and headlights going we were apparently invisible to the 99 percent of drivers who tried to barrel on past at 55 per. Once the dancer got there they slowed down more.

The dog was alert and patient, and seemed to trust us, and yet what could we do? Without a litter we couldn't even move her off the pavement. The best possible prognosis for her was a broken hip. Far more likely, and far more ominous, was a broken back. She didn't move her hind legs once while I stood there. Had we moved her we might have sealed her fate, worsened her injuries, especially if she had flailed or snapped at us in her pain. I stroked her head, looked in my car for the blanket I thought might be there (it wasn't), yelled at drivers who couldn't be bothered to swerve more than a foot from her muzzle, thanked the ones who crept by at a safe distance. After fifteen minutes the dog started to whine, and tucked her nose in between her legs as though she'd given up hope that we'd be able to get her back to her bowl and bed.

The next twenty minutes went on forever.

And then a Yucca Valley police officer showed up, perhaps 40 minutes after I did, with lights and radio and obvious experience with injured dogs. I filled him in with what little I'd figured about her condition. He sized her up with his bright flashlight. He said something about internal bleeding. Suddenly I was in the way. I went home.

Animals die along this road every night. Dogs and the occasional cat, wild rabbits, coyotes, birds and bats, snakes. The young man in the pickup truck last night was kind and sensitive and appalled at the injuries he probably couldn't have avoided inflicting. He stopped to do what he could, and a group of people joined him to try to help. That happens seldom. He could as easily have driven on, leaving the dog to die beneath the wheels of a speeding F-150 with a driver busy texting. Had he hit something other than a clearly domesticated chocolate lab he may not have stopped.

Dogs beg our sympathy. We anthropomorphize them without apology. We feel free to interpret what we can read of their intentions and desires. Sometimes we even get it right. They've lived with us for 15,000 years and we with them, and where our sentiences overlap we can communicate. We sympathize with them the way we might not with a snake or a wild rabbit.

I have spent more time than most living in places where the wildlife is protected, and I've often wished there were 15 mile per hour speed limits throughout the desert, enforced by rangers with radar and tasers. We spend millions of dollars to protect the wildlife and then let people drive over that wildlife at 80 miles per hour on their way to Las Vegas.

But it wasn't until last night that it really sank in. I don't know what happened to that sweet, trusting, patient dog after I left. I don't know that I want to know. Her eyes shone in my mind until late last night, and then again this morning. Her fear and pain and quiet pleading haunt me. Despite myself, I am ashamed that I couldn't give her what she asked me for. But last night, standing there with her, it struck me that she was perversely lucky. She, at least, could hope that the humans standing around would help. Every night animals die along this road with every bit of her pain and fear, but without the calm optimism that a few useless humans nearby might eventually figure out how to help, without so much as a small car pulled up onto the shoulder with its lights flashing vainly to warn oncoming traffic away from hitting them again.

Hold Hands and Stick Together: the Next Educated Mind May Change Your Life

2012-10-23T18:02:01Z

Looking over Ojai, CA | Photo: Ken Lund/Flickr/Creative Commons License

It's entirely possible that school will end in May in Ojai. This will be a celebration in some quarters, but a dire loss in others.

Ojai, of course, isn't alone. What's happening in this small town sixty-five miles north of Los Angeles mirrors what's happening across California. There's not enough money for education. And so education is diminished on many fronts. In Ojai, if Proposition 30 doesn't pass, the kids get out three weeks early. I know there will be some celebrating because I was a kid once.

]]> But I am an adult now, and while this is a handicap on many fronts it does allow me to see beyond summer. So do other adults. Which is why Proposition 30, which will establish temporary taxes to fund education, is on the November 6 ballot. Similar ballot measures are hoping to bolster our struggling schools. Ventura, where I live, will vote on Measure Q. If Measure Q passes property owners will pay an additional $59 a year in taxes for the next four years. The money will go directly into the classrooms in the Ventura Unified School District. The hope is the money will help reverse the trend of swelling class sizes and prevent more cuts in programs ranging from science and technology to reading, writing, and math. People are against it. They argue that they are short on money themselves, and with increases in Federal and State income taxes already in the offing this will sting them even more. No doubt, this is a valid point.

I'm not a political columnist or an education expert. I am a parent, and, with full disclosure in mind, I am married to an amazing teacher. This does not place my wife in a minority. Because of cutbacks, my wife teaches a combination classroom of 3rd and 4th graders. Thirty-one children. There is no aide. This is like asking a juggler to, well, keep thirty-one minds in the air. Or, if you're prone to pessimistic analogies, that little Dutch boy putting thirty-one fingers in the dike. My wife cares about each and every child as if they were her own. This doesn't put her in rarefied company either. But even with all the amazing teachers, the battle is a losing one.

In Ojai, where my wife teaches, some residents are trying to help the schools. Since 1993 the Ojai Education Foundation has worked to raise money for the schools. Recently several women organized the "100 for Ojai Schools" campaign. They are asking each household in Ojai to donate $100 for the schools. This won't happen. This is sad, but understandable. These days not everyone has $100 to spare. But the broader picture is sadder; in Ojai, Ventura, and pretty much every town, city, and county in the state, those who care about education have to hunt for money, hat in their hand.

Politics have become very, very complex. Politicians can speak in a language few of us understand. I have read ballot initiatives three and four times and had no idea what they were saying. There are honest people trying to do the right thing, just as there is deception and self-interest. Often I am baffled. But I am clear on this. Something is seriously wrong when our most important asset has to ask for money.

If you are old enough, you may remember Robert Fulghum. If you are young enough, you are likely living by some the dictums he brought to light. In 1986 Fulghum wrote a book called "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." Among the things Fulghum learned in kindergarten...

Share everything.
Play Fair.
Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don't take things that aren't yours.
Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.

Fulghum was a minister when he wrote these ground rules as part of a sermon. When they became a book, the book was a smash hit. I interviewed him shortly after the book ended up on thousands of bed stands. Sitting in a hotel room in Los Angeles he told me he was glad he'd written the book, but they weren't really his words in the first place. He learned them from his teachers. A five-year-old could tell you that.

But many adults saw the rules as Fulghum's, and they saw how the rules made sense in the adult world, too. Clean up your own mess; here, the underpinnings of sound environmental policy. Don't take things that aren't yours; here, the underpinnings of aggression and war. Play fair. Wouldn't it be nice if deception and self-interest succumbed to this one?

At times, I have been accused of being a child. I am never offended. Children are not perfect. We only have to look back to our own childhood to know this. But children do see things simply. They really look (another of Fulghum's kindergarten rules). They aren't confused or bogged down by the fog, intentional or unintentional, of adult detail and complication.

Once, working on a book, I spent several days at a preschool in Ventura. Our sons had gone to the preschool. Ten years later many of the same teachers were still there. For some reason they welcomed me back.

In the days I spent at Children's World I received a refresher course in Everything I Already Knew but Had Sadly Forgotten. I learned why we have two ears and one set of lips (Hint. Which is most important?). I learned the purpose for living (love). I learned what it means to be a family, and what to do if I do something wrong. I learned to see the astonishing in what many see as commonplace. I learned that William's mom has long blond hair and there's a lot of brown under it.

One day there was an altercation. Someone pushed someone else off the box at the water fountain. There was crying on the one hand and protesting on the other, but the teacher handled it simply.

Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.

It was great fun palling around with my friends Alek, Elise, and Kelsa. These kids, four and five years old, were so very bright. Supernova bright. They did and said things that stopped me slack-jawed, and then, after I recovered, made me goose pimple with hope and joy. With minds like this, the world might be made closer to right. Or, if you have had encounters with the likes of Alek, Elise, and Kelsa, remarkably better. For all of us.

Robert Fulghum had another Kindergarten rule. Hold hands and stick together. Louis Pasteur went to school. Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, Jonas Salk, Bill Gates. You never know when the next well-educated mind will directly touch your life. We are all in this together.

It's been four years since my visit to Children's World. I hope Alek, Elise, and Kelsa are not missing out on science, reading or something that will spark their minds and send them off to places we have never dreamed of. I hope they're not sitting in a classroom with thirty other kids while a caring teacher works only to put out brushfires and address the bare bones basics. But there's a good chance they are.

Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.

Busted California? Analyzing the Census Numbers

2012-10-22T21:00:00Z

| Photo: thewoodenshoes /Flickr/Creative Commons License

Dan Walters, the Sacramento Bee's political columnist, thinks the Manhattan Institute (a rightward pointing think thank) has misinterpreted the math of California's decline. Walters accepts that Census numbers document the out-migration of millions of California residents over the past two decades. But he's not convinced that the Census data can only be read as a downward projection:

]]> (T)he out-migration has not been consistent. Rather, it has coincided with the three serious recessions that hammered the state during that period, one in the early 1990s, one a decade later and the latest, triggered by the bursting of the housing bubble, that still afflicts the state. The most dramatic outflow occurred two decades ago, when the end of the Cold War resulted in a massive downsizing of California's once-huge military/aerospace industry. . . . That had nothing to do with California's political or economic climate.

The Manhattan Institute, while not ignoring the shift in Pentagon spending, insists that taxes, regulations, and an amorphous "anti-business climate" have driven businesses from the state and kept out new industries that, speculatively, should have produced the thousands of jobs that Northrop, Douglas, and North American (among others) once did.

Except those numbers don't seem to add up to that ideologically pure conclusion.

According to the Public Policy Institute, less than two percent of the jobs lost in California between 1999 and 2006 resulted from business relocation. In fact, very few businesses move into or out of California. The employment change due to relocation -- a loss of about 9,000 jobs between 1999 and 2006 -- represented only 0.05 percent of California's 18 million jobs (based on the Public Policy Institute's tracking surveys).

Nearly all of the state's job losses came from businesses that failed -- in one way or another -- to prosper here.

Taxes, even according to friendly observers, represent a fraction of business overhead in California, given the business deductions allowed under the state's tax code. And as Allen Prohofsky, of the California Franchise Tax Board, tartly notes, profitable companies tend to stay where they're profitable and unprofitable companies -- those likely to fail -- don't. He might have added that successful companies have profits on which to pay taxes. Unsuccessful companies don't.

But what about crumbling infrastructure, traffic congestion, and poorly performing schools as impediments to business growth and job creation? Taxes have to pay to reverse those trends, preferably with a semblance of balance between what individuals pay and what businesses contribute.

Finally, an argument has been made that the kind of jobs that have left California since 1999 are those that required only modest skills and an equally sketchy education. The companies that used to hire high-school graduates to stand in front of a machine for eight hours a day have been swept away by globalization and their employees dispersed.

It's hard to imagine Californians accepting an economic régime that could impose the wage and working conditions of Mexico, India, Malaysia, or China. The risk, of course, is a bi-polar economy with some good-paying jobs at the top and some poorly paying jobs at the very bottom and nothing in between for the mass of men and women who are not MBAs but who cannot raise a family on Burger King wages.

Misunderstanding how and why the state's economy is changing won't solve that conundrum.

And we don't know how many former Californians left because they didn't like the life they led here. Or how many left out of homesickness and returned to the relative certainties of their childhood community. Or how many reaped the equity from their working-class tract house to buy what they hoped would be a final home somewhere else.

We don't know if nostalgia -- or taxes -- sent them on their way, despite claims that only economic reasons move people. We know that isn't true, since so many present and former Californians came here for reasons of the heart and not of the tax code.

D. J. Waldie, author and historian, writes about Los Angeles twice each week at KCET's SoCal Focus blog.

At Home in the Everyday Sublime

2012-10-20T00:00:00Z

| Author's Collection

I live in the small, tract house my parents bought in 1946 just before my older brother was born, two years before me.

When I tell this to interviewers, I get a look of mild amazement. This has happened so many times that continuing to live in that house has begun to seem like a stunt, like sitting on a flagpole or eating only kelp or taking a vow of perpetual silence (something my great aunts did when they joined the cloistered Carmelite nuns in Brooklyn).

]]> Although I sometime feel that I ought to move away, mostly out of deference to other people's opinions, I suspect I won't. I remember too much.

I remember digging in the adobe soil of my backyard when I was a boy, excavating roads, mounding up house walls, and laying Popsicle sticks over them for a properly modern flat roof. A few minutes work, and there was a house.

There are no orthodoxies in children's play, but there are always self-imposed rules that give play some narrative coherence. There is always a context (even if it is only the edges of a flowerbed).

That digging in the dirt -- the architectural practice of my childhood -- was both a joy and an education. I learned how make something imaginative out of materials literally at hand. In the end and after some reflection, I learned how humble materials shaped what my imagination could become.

Gradually, often imperceptibly, and sometimes contrary to original conceptions, through the interplay of memory and the material world, a place becomes a home.

The stories I tell myself about my home don't describe a perfect place. The best of them account for my preference for ordinariness and help me resist the subordination of my everyday life. These stories acknowledge that place making is a collaborative work and possibly redemptive.

Against faded and over-hyped images of Southern California as "an extraordinary, unattainable, and ultimately disappointing place," stand the lives sheltered in our homes, in our gridded neighborhoods, and in the overlapping communities to which we return again and again to give scale and value to our experiences.

If you look with wonder and interest, you will see ordinariness becoming sublime.

D. J. Waldie, author and historian, writes about Los Angeles twice each week at KCET's SoCal Focus blog.

Autumn Comes To The Desert

2012-10-19T22:40:59Z

Autumn in the Antelope Valley | Chris Clarke Photo

If you live where the skies are dark you notice it first in the constellations. The summer stars begin to shift out of view, rising four minutes earlier each day until they spend most of their time shining vainly through blue daylit sky, and winter constellations like Taurus, the Pleiades, and Orion start to make their way through the night sky. But you don't have to recognize any constellations to detect the shift in seasons: you just have to notice that all of a sudden you're seeing them on your way home from work.

]]> Winter nights are long in the desert, just like they are elsewhere outside the tropics, and autumn provides a warmup. California's desert cools off this time of year. Before long nighttime temperatures may reach freezing. But we're also heading into the time of year when water is most reliably available, and available water means more chance to grow. So unlike other places where Nature uses autumn to prepare for being mostly shut down in winter, autumn in the California deserts is a complex dance of some things waking up and others going to sleep.

It's warm during the day, still, even in the High Desert, but there have been enough cold nights that lizards and snakes have gotten scarce. Venturing out means a reptile is more likely to find a roadrunner or other predator trying to fatten up for the cold months. A cold night means more time spent trying to warm up in the sun, which means more time exposed and vulnerably sluggish. Smaller lizards' food supply -- insects and other invertebrates -- have dried up anyway, at least above 3,000 feet or so. As packrats and deermice spend fewer night hours abroad, hunting goes south for snakes as well. This is the time of year when snakes start to decide not to get out of bed on cold mornings, much to the relief of rattler-shy hikers. The cold half of the year isn't snake-free: you can find rattlesnakes active in the desert at any time of the year if the daytime temperature's above 70° or so. I've seen one or two on warm afternoons in January. But for the most part, that spine-chilling rattle gets less frequent this time of year.

Animals that stay active after summer ends are working hard to fatten up. The Audubon's cottontail rabbits near Joshua Tree National Park have grown sleek in recent weeks. Coyote song rings out each night as one rabbit or another is harvested. Rabbits stay active throughout the winter rainy season, in part because that's when the best rabbit food is available: the just-sprouted annual plants and new flush of growth on desert shrubs. During the summer they tend to hunker, emerging from the shelter of a shrub or den mainly at dusk and dawn. These days it's more common to see them abroad at noon. Cottontails don't have to have access to water to survive, as they can create it by metabolizing their food. But unlike the kangaroo rat, which is probably the desert mammal that can turn food into water most efficiently, cottontails will drink water if it's available. I have a dish of water in our yard that I refill every day, and each morning this week as I've stumbled into the kitchen to make coffee a cottontail or two have been quietly lapping up the Joshua Tree tap water there.

Gambel's quail are kind of the bird equivalents of rabbits around here: plant eaters that breed abundantly and are regularly eaten. This week it's clear the local quail are thinking about making their next generation of chicks. The last batch are either grown to maturity or long-eaten, and quail that stuck to mated pairs all summer are now massing in coveys of two or three dozen. I throw a few hands full of sunflower seeds to them each morning, and even when they were paired off they'd assemble to come clean every last seed from the ground. Now, though, the males spend more time squabbling than eating. A male will venture too close to a female who's been spoken for, and her mate will drop the seed he's been eating and chase the interloper for twenty feet or so. Or males will square off, stand on tiptoe, jut out their breasts at each other and flap their wings violently. The females attend to eating: they have the harder job looming, what with the impending laying. More food eaten now means more fat and protein and calcium to make eggs with.

In a few weeks we'll see the pairs split off from the covey again, and then little families with mom and dad and a line of tiny quail behind them, the babies disappearing one by one. The roadrunner will be far less welcome in the yard. Now he ambles past the quail mostly unmolested. The last time there were juvenile quail about, the males treed the roadrunner every day, keeping him away from their offspring.

If the winter rains start soon, and perhaps even lead to a few days of snow, the Joshua trees will start showing odd changes in another two months. The buds at the ends of the branches are usually set to grow a new year's crop of dagger-like leaves. But if the winter is wet enough, a few will undergo a little-understood shift thought to be triggered in part by a combination of moisture and temperature. They will change from leaf buds into flower buds. In late winter they will add spires of pale cream-colored blossoms to the trees' outlines.

If winter rains come to the High Desert soon, before the temperatures drop, we may see a second season of bloom, including a repeat of some spring flowers like sand verbena and Mojave aster, and perhaps a few that bloom only in the fall. If cold comes before the rains, the Mojave's floral color will tend toward deep rust-red: the dried, inflated stems of desert trumpet, the spent blooms of California buckwheat, the stems and leaves of invasive red brome grass. They give a sense of autumn to the desert that even the most recently transplanted Easterner will understand.