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4b99a27cc02168d6dacc49c292269252 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-08-fi-19931-story.html | American Express Slow to Deal Blue Card | American Express Slow to Deal Blue Card
American Express Co.'s new Blue credit card, aimed at busy Internet users, is taking as many as 40 days to get to applicants because the company failed to anticipate the response.
The company began sending the first cards to customers on Wednesday, four weeks after introducing it, and some early applicants won’t get their cards for another two weeks. The average wait for a new card is about 14 days, according to industry consultants.
The Blue card is one of several credit cards being offered with 0% interest as an introductory rate, but it’s the only one so far with an embedded computer chip, to make shopping over the Net more secure by encoding stored financial data.
The card is manufactured in Europe and takes two to three weeks to produce, compared with seven to 10 days for a typical magnetic-strip card, a spokeswoman for American Express said.
“They shouldn’t have been surprised by the response,” said David Gagie, marketing director at Auriemma Consulting Group Inc., a Westbury, N.Y.-based firm that offers advice to card companies on marketing and product development. “Technology products always have very early interest and this card also had had heavy early media attention, unusual for a credit card.”
The company’s competitors, including NextCard Inc., Providian Financial Corp. and Bank One Corp.'s First USA unit, let consumers know within seconds of submitting an Internet application whether they’ve been approved for a card. Applicants for the Blue card and other American Express cards have to wait weeks to find out--through the mail.
American Express introduced the card Sept. 8 with much fanfare and has promoted it with a rock concert in Central Park and ads on everything from the Internet to buses to popcorn bags at movie theaters.
The big push comes amid intensifying competition among credit card issuers. Other companies trying to entice consumers with a 0% teaser rate and no annual fee include Providian, with its Aria Visa, and Citigroup Inc.'s Travelers Bank USA, with its Quicken Platinum or Business MasterCard.
Other terms vary, however, and consumers should read the fine print on card offers to determine whether a card fits their needs.
The Blue and Quicken cards each apply the 0% rate only to new purchases for six months. They charge 9.99% and 5.90% for balance transfers, respectively.
The Blue card also charges 20.99% interest on cash advances.
The Aria card charges 0% for both new purchases and balance transfers, but after three months the rate goes up to 7.99%, 12.99% or 19.99%, depending on the borrower’s credit history.
Company Web sites providing information about the 0% credit cards include: Blue from American Express, https://www.americanexpress.com/blue; Aria from Providian, https://www.aria.com; Quicken card from Travelers Bank, https://www.quickencard.com.
Web sites that give credit card tips include: Bank Rate Monitor, https://www.bankrate.com; CardWeb, https://www.cardweb.com; Consumer Action, https://www.consumer-action.org; Credit Card Advisor, https://www.creditcardmenu.com/; GetSmart, https://www.getsmart.com; Lending Tree, https://www.lendingtree.com; Money Whiz, https://www.thewhiz.com.
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9f94eb4ddfdb3351da784591fee1681b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-09-mn-20604-story.html | Paul Petzoldt; Pioneering Mountaineer, School Founder | Paul Petzoldt; Pioneering Mountaineer, School Founder
By his own definition, Paul Petzoldt was a contradiction in terms.
“There are old climbers, and there are bold climbers,” he said, “but there are no old, bold climbers.”
Petzoldt, however, was an old, bold climber. In 1994, when he was 86 and suffering from glaucoma, he tackled Wyoming’s formidable Grand Teton to commemorate the 70th anniversary of his first trek to the top of that 13,766-foot peak.
He made it to 11,000 feet and decided that was enough for a blind octogenarian, even if he was Paul Petzoldt, the legendary climber considered king of winter mountaineers.
Petzoldt, who had a ridge of the peak he so loved to climb named after him, died Wednesday of prostate cancer at a nursing home in Topsham, Maine. He was 91.
He was a celebrated alpinist who pioneered a number of mountaineering techniques. As founder of the National Outdoor Leadership School, he also was called the father of wilderness education.
Former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming, who worked with Petzoldt on environmental legislation, called the climber a “warm, wise, witty bear of a man” who “had the guts and courage of a mountain lion.”
Born and raised on an Idaho ranch near Snake River Canyon, Petzoldt loved the outdoors from an early age. He led trips into the Sawtooth range when he was only 12.
In 1924, when he was 16, he pulled on cowboy boots, overalls and a blue shirt and bundled a few supplies in a blanket to make his first assault on the Grand Teton peak, which towers above Jackson Hole. During the climb he recovered the body of Theodore Teepe, the first person to die while attempting to ascend Grand Teton. Petzoldt nearly froze to death, but weathered a howling blizzard to reach the summit with his friend Ralph Herron.
By the time they returned to the bottom, Petzoldt’s boots had disintegrated and his feet were bleeding.
“This experience,” he later wrote, “set the direction of my life. I knew that if I wanted to live to be an old mountaineer, I could not take such chances and be so uninformed about dangerous activities.”
He launched the first guide service in Grand Teton National Park in the early 1930s and spent the next three decades leading people into the Teton range. He also built an international reputation as a climber.
In 1934 Petzoldt made alpinist history with a “double traverse” of the Matterhorn, ascending on the Swiss side, crossing the hazardous Italian ridge, then descending the Swiss side, all in 14 hours.
In 1936, he and two other mountaineers made the first winter ascent of Grand Teton. And Petzoldt climbed K2--the Himalayan peak considered the most challenging in the world--as part of the first American expedition in 1938. He set a record for the longest continuous climb without artificial oxygen at an altitude of more than 20,000 feet.
While training ski troops in Colorado during World War II, Petzoldt began to experiment with wilderness survival techniques, gradually developing a philosophy and a system.
Among the contributions he made to mountaineering were the first voice signal system for climbers and the “sliding middleman” method used in snow climbing.
In 1963, he helped establish the first American Outward Bound program, in Colorado, where he was chief instructor, and tried to teach his system of wilderness living to others. In 1965 he started a school.
The National Outdoor Leadership School opened in Lander, Wyo., with 100 students and three teachers. Using the nearby Wind River range, the school taught people how to live responsibly in the wilderness and conserve nature.
One of the institution’s trademark objectives was something called “minimum impact camping,” which taught people how to enjoy camping without damaging the wilderness. Over the past 30 years, the school has trained 50,000 people in outdoor safety and ethics around the world.
For years, Petzoldt made an annual winter climb of Grand Teton, which he considered a more formidable mountain than Everest in that season. The last 60 feet are particularly perilous, involving steep acrobatic climbing on icy rocks.
No one knows how many times Petzoldt climbed Grand Teton. And his zest for the challenging peak never diminished.
He made it to the top in 1984 on the 60th anniversary of his first ascent. He was 76.
A decade later, he returned for what would be his last ascent. Aided by four former students and trained instructors, Petzoldt took two or three steps with each measured breath, practicing the rhythmic breathing method he developed in 1938 when he took on K2.
He stopped about 2,000 feet short of the summit but did not seem disappointed. He had enjoyed the sunshine, soft breezes and magnificent vistas.
“I never could see the sense of going to the top of the goddamn mountain just because it was there. If that’s all it means,” he said in an interview many years earlier, “you might as well stay at the bottom in the bar.”
Petzoldt is survived by his wife, Virginia. A memorial service will be held Oct. 16 at 11 a.m. at St. Anne’s Church in Windham, Maine. Donations may be sent to the Paul Petzoldt Legacy Scholarship at the National Outdoor Leadership School, 288 Main St., Lander, WY 82520.
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be2487af2f122769d2069b86055a29f4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-11-fi-21120-story.html | Company Is Making More Than a Peep in the Candy Industry | Company Is Making More Than a Peep in the Candy Industry
Sugarcoated Marshmallow Peeps chicks and bunnies have proved a habit-forming treat for Easter candy buyers over four decades, but manufacturer Just Born Inc. still considers itself in a race for sugary survival.
So the company is hatching strategies to boost sales year-round.
The marshmallow goodies are being morphed into sweets for all seasons: white Peeps Ghosts are new this year in addition to orange Pumpkins and Spooky Cats for Halloween, green Christmas Trees and white Snowmen for Christmas and--new for Valentine’s Day 2000--red strawberry Peeps Hearts.
The company also is launching a different product this fall, jelly bean-like Zours intended to challenge Sour Patch Kids and Warheads in the sour candy category.
Just Born has slapped Zours logos on the fiery red NASCAR racer it sponsors to tout its Hot Tamale cinnamon candy, and the Zours started showing up on shelves last month.
Other Just Born marketers are working to export Peeps, Zours, Mike and Ike jelly beans and Hot Tamales as far away as Australia, which is partial to Peeps, and China, where taste runs to Mike and Ikes.
To pump out the new products, three football fields’ worth of space--135,000 square feet--is being added to the Just Born plant 50 miles north of Philadelphia.
As a privately held company, Just Born does not divulge sales and income. But it is not a huge confectionary power like multinational Nestle, Mars and chocolate colossus Hershey, its eastern Pennsylvania neighbor just 70 miles away.
The company, started by Sam Born, who immigrated to the U.S. from Russia in 1910, employs 400 people in Bethlehem, an eastern Pennsylvania city of 70,000, some of them third-generation candy makers.
“This is Peep One. This is where all Peeps are made, right here,” said Taylor Birckhead, project engineer, waving at a production line where Peeps chicks plop from a tub of hot marshmallow, get dusted with yellow sugar, dotted with eyes and zipped into cellophane in six minutes from vat to pack.
A parallel line squirts out Ghosts, Pumpkins and Peeps for other seasons. “I had a hand in automating a lot of this,” Birckhead said. “There are not a lot of people who work with marshmallow. There is no one you can go to.”
He knows every inch of his candy factory domain, bustling with employees in white coats, hairnets and some headphone-style hearing protectors.
Mixers, cookers and conveyors hiss and rumble, and the air is sharp with cinnamon and fruit scents. Bins, trays and conveyor belts are piled with candy.
“Actually, I’ve calculated this,” Birckhead said, pausing at a stopped conveyor heaped with the bright red Hot Tamales. “This belt holds just about a ton of Hot Tamales when it is full like this.”
Larger candy makers often approach Just Born with offers, wanting to make Peeps and hot-selling Hot Tamales part of their profit picture, said David N. Shaffer, nephew of the founder and co-president of the company with Sam Born’s grandson, Ross Born.
Shaffer won’t reveal details but said the company rejects the advances and wants to stay independent.
“In our vision statement we are committed to continue as a family-owned confectionary business,” he said.
To remain a presence in an industry where thousands of new candy products are introduced every year means constant strategizing, Shaffer said. “Growth is critical in this business, if you are going to thrive as a privately held company.”
The company has been in Bethlehem since 1932, when Sam Born moved it to an empty factory there from New York at the height of the Depression. He didn’t start flooding the world with marshmallow chicks until the 1950s.
In 1953, Just Born acquired Rodda Candy Co. of Lancaster, best known for its jelly bean technology but also possessor of a patent for a small line of handmade sugary chicks called Peeps.
Just Born mechanized pumping out the Peeps, which now stream along a production line at up to 2 million a day in lavender, white and blue as well as the original yellow and pink, and have been the top-selling non-chocolate Easter confection for the last five years.
The squishy sweets attract a special following, generating a slew of Web sites with collections of Peeps art and poetry and, stranger still, descriptions of the effects of drying, roasting and even boiling the gooey treats.
Americans eat about 25 pounds of candy per person per year, about evenly divided between chocolate and non-chocolate, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Which candy they eat has a lot to do with which they see first, so confectioners battle fiercely for prominence on candy counters, said Matthew J. Pye, product manager for the new Zours as well as Mike and Ike jelly beans and Hot Tamales, currently the No. 1 cinnamon candy.
“It’s all about shelf space,” Pye said. “There were over 1,000 new products launched last year. The amount of shelf space did not expand to take care of that.
“We know Mars and Hershey are going to be spending millions of dollars in advertising. We don’t have the same amount of dollars, so we have to try to be innovative.”
That effort led to the NASCAR connection and its hoped-for allure among Just Born’s customers. They are in the 12-to-24 age group that encompasses 25% of NASCAR fans.
Just Born is sponsoring the fiery red Hot Tamale Chevrolet Monte Carlo--also carrying the new Zours logo--that finished 28th on Aug. 21 in the NAPA 200 at Michigan Speedway in Brooklyn, Mich.
The Zours appeared last month, “just in time for kids back to school,” in stores such as Target, Eckerds, Walgreens, Dollar stores and Winn Dixie as well as video stores and movie theaters, said Greg Barratt, Just Born’s head of marketing.
As part of the stock car arrangement, the candy packages carry the NASCAR logo, giving them an edge when store managers who know racing’s popularity stock their shelves.
“In the battle for display space it brings us to the top of the pile,” said Kevin Riveroll, a product manager shepherding the NASCAR deal. “Candy is an impulse buy. If you put it on display it will sell.”
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4f1dc628b9f67ee9346f127dac0c47df | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-15-ca-22382-story.html | The Roundhouse Miss | The Roundhouse Miss
“Fight Club,” a film about men who like to fight, is an unsettling experience, but not the way anyone intended. What’s most troubling about this witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone-crunching violence is the increasing realization that it actually thinks it’s saying something of significance. That is a scary notion indeed.
Director David Fincher, with “Alien3,” “The Game” and “Seven” in his past, is one of cinema’s premier brutalizers, able to impale audiences on meat hooks and make them like it. So it’s no surprise that “Fight Club’s” level of visceral violence, its stomach-turning string of bloody and protracted bare-knuckles brawls, make it more than worthy of an NC-17 if the MPAA could ever work up the nerve (don’t hold your breath) to give that rating to a major studio film.
What is a surprise is how much of “Fight Club” is simply tedious. It’s not just the crack-brained nature of its core premise, that what every man wants, needs and appreciates in his heart of hearts is the chance to get kicked, gouged and severely beaten by another guy. It’s also the windy attempts at pseudo-profundity in Jim Uhls’ adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, the feeble dime-store nihilism on the order of “It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything.”
“Fight Club” opens with its two protagonists in a moment of crisis: Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) has shoved a revolver down the throat of the nameless narrator the film sometimes calls Jack (Edward Norton) as both men occupy what Jack calls “front row seats for the theater of mass destruction.”
An extensive flashback is clearly in order, and it begins with Jack’s numbing life as a bland, robotic numbers-cruncher for a major auto maker whose job it is to determine how many deaths it takes to make it financially prudent to call for a product recall. (Protean actor Norton can disappear into anyone, but the spectacle of him disappearing into a barely-alive nobody is not particularly gratifying.)
Living in an apartment tower he characterizes as “a filing cabinet for widows and young professionals,” Jack divides his time between two preoccupations. He compulsively shops for home furnishings (“We used to read pornography; now it’s the Horchow Collection”) and, unable to sleep, he attends touchy-feely support group sessions for people with life-threatening diseases. Here he meets Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter, as far as you can get from her Merchant Ivory past), a fellow faker with ratty hair and a rattier, cigarettes-and-cheap-jewelery lifestyle who lives as if, yes, “we might die at any moment.”
These initial parts of “Fight Club” are structured in part as satires on the modern mania for consumerism and the cult of New Age sensitivity. Certainly these areas are ripe for sending up, but this film is so contemptuous of anything human, so eager to employ know-it-all smugness, that the cure plays worse than the disease.
It’s on an airplane that Jack runs into Durden, a primeval savant whose business is soap but whose wild red jacket and matching sunglasses mark him as a kind of walking id. Durden, we admiringly come to discover, spends his spare time splicing frames of pornography into family films (how brave! how iconoclastic!) and serving as “a guerrilla terrorist in the food service industry,” fouling various foods with his own bodily fluids. Is it any wonder both the film and Jack view him as a truth-telling avatar of compelling frankness?
Soon the two men are living together in a dilapidated hovel (no consumerism for them) that looks like a slum the Addams family happily abandoned and Jack is absorbing Durden’s bracing bons mots about the state of the American male, variously called “a generation of men raised by women” and “slaves with white collars.” “Our great war,” Durden all but preaches, “is a spiritual war, our Great Depression is our lives.”
(In one of the more curious footnotes to modern culture, “Fight Club” plays at times like the bombastic World Wrestling Federation version of Susan Faludi’s “Stiffed,” also a treatise on men who have “lost their compass in the world” and suffer from “the American masculinity crisis.”)
Tyler’s answer to this malaise is Fight Club, where strangers find that savagely beating each other is such a cathartic, practically religious experience that guys are, well, fighting to get in. While both Tyler (“I don’t want to die without any scars”) and Jack (“You weren’t alive anywhere like you were there. . . . After fighting everything else in your life is like the volume turned down”) are capable of extended neo-macho riffs on the virtues of Fight Club, that doesn’t prevent the whole concept from playing like the delusional rantings of testosterone-addicted thugs.
Tyler keeps upping the ante for the men he recruits, turning Fight Club habitues into an organized mob of nihilistic bad boys wrecking havoc on our puny, emasculated civilization. Though the film employs dubious plot twists to quasi-distance itself from the weirder implications of a philosophy the Columbine gunmen would likely have found congenial, it’s to little effect. Aside from the protracted beatings, this film is so vacuous and empty it’s more depressing than provocative. If the first rule of Fight Club is “Nobody talks about Fight Club,” a fitting subsection might be “Why would anyone want to?”
* MPAA rating: R, for disturbing and graphic depiction of violent antisocial behavior, sexuality and language. Times guidelines: numerous exceptionally graphic beatings and brief glimpses of a naked male sexual organ.
‘Fight Club’
Edward Norton: Narrator
Brad Pitt: Tyler Durden
Helena Bonham Carter: Marla Singer
Meat Loaf Aday: Robert Paulsen
Jared Leto: Angel Face
Fox 2000 Pictures and Regency Enterprises present a Linson Films production, released by 20th Century Fox. Director David Fincher. Producers Art Linson, Cean Chaffin, Ross Grayson Bell. Executive producer Arnon Milchan. Screenplay Jim Uhls, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth. Editor James Haygood. Costumes Michael Kaplan. Music the Dust Brothers. Production design Alex McDowell. Art director Chris Gorak. Set decorator Jay R. Hart. Running time: 2 hours, 19 minutes.
In general release.
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56dd794ec729d9e7278ebcb118620f7b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-16-ca-22794-story.html | ‘Curb’ Spotlights the George Costanza in David | ‘Curb’ Spotlights the George Costanza in David
Hard-core “Seinfeld” fans know fictional George Costanza was largely an extension of Larry David, the former NBC hit’s gloomy co-founder and creative spine who was a stand-up comic before scoring mightily in prime time.
With at least some of his famed dark personality tics and neuroses intact, he comes to HBO Sunday night in his own mockumentary, “Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm,” a show within a show about how he got and prepared for this show.
Believe it at your own risk.
How good a mockumentarian is David? His pockets of stand-up here (at times a sound-alike for despairing Richard Lewis) are ragged and uneven. Except for occasional belabored moments, the rest of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” ranges from genial to hilarious, with the self-spoofing David as himself amid a company of actors convincingly playing his manager, wife, friends and associates. Helping them are some other performers who appear as themselves.
In addition, the hour seamlessly intercuts apparently straight comments about David from Jerry Seinfeld; his “Seinfeld” alter ego, Jason Alexander; “Seinfeld” writer Larry Charles and others.
Alexander recalls George being “as shameless a Larry David imitation as I could muster.” And Glenn Padnick, president of Castle Rock TV, says that when “Seinfeld” began soaring on NBC, David “was stuck with success for the first time in his life.”
Assisted by director Robert B. Weide, he battles it from start to finish in “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” The journey begins with David and his manager, Jeff Greene (Jeff Garlin), pitching the show to HBO executives named after the actors (Allan Wasserman and Judy Toll) who play them, as the faux documentary records this industry ritual for posterity.
Although “Seinfeld” mavens will instantly recall another pitch--Jerry and George describing their show about nothing to NBC executives--the tone here is closer to HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show.” With Greene touting the concept (a chronicle of David’s activities leading to his stand-up show in Los Angeles), David sweating thick beads of self-hatred (“Stinks, right?”) and the HBO pair faking laughter at his every utterance, this funny display of insincerity could not have been staged better by Garry Shandling and company.
The format also has David doing warmup gigs in clubs in New York and Los Angeles. More of a hoot, though, is a series of George Costanza moments in which he moves from abuse to abuse.
One has him reluctantly trying to help someone get a job, a task naturally doomed to failure. Another has him trying to explain to a friend of his wife (Cheryl Hines) his presence in Central Park with a young cutie who is actually the extramarital partner of his manager. And later, his panicky attempt to shamelessly fib his way out of a dilemma of his own making is just a classic, the sheer outrageousness of the lie recalling George at his most two-faced and funniest.
What a crushing burden this triumphant conclusion to “Curb Your Enthusiasm” must be on David. Just when things were going so well, rats!
More success.
* “Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm” will be shown Sunday at 10 p.m. on HBO. The network has rated it TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17).
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e25f35f28f8a2b2afece83b936f8e46a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-20-me-24362-story.html | Deadly Flood of 1938 Left Its Mark on Southland | Deadly Flood of 1938 Left Its Mark on Southland
At the time, nobody knew to blame the fierce winter of 1938 on a distant Pacific temperature blip that would come to be called El Nino. All anyone knew was that a relentless flurry of rainstorms kept drenching Southern California.
That February, Los Angeles endured its most concentrated rain since the big floods of 1884. The month closed with a mean streak, dropping 4 1/2 inches of rain in a nonstop deluge. When the bad weather seemed to break, the morning Times of March 2 congratulated the city for “the small amount of damage that has resulted.”
Before those papers could be delivered, the rain had started up again, and the killer flood of the century in Los Angeles and surrounding counties was underway--a flood that would forever change the look of Southern California.
It was classic “torrent and inundation"--heavy rain fell on already saturated soil and mountainsides, ran off and rushed down creeks and canyons toward the lowest point on the landscape: the Los Angeles River.
Early on March 2, the ranches and scattered towns in the San Fernando Valley--where the river begins--were cut off by engorged canyon washes spilling their banks. Bridges over the river were washed out by fast-rising swift water. The situation turned more dire when the gates were opened on Big Tujunga Dam, in the San Gabriel Mountains, to save the structure and avert a catastrophe. This released even more flood water across the lightly populated valley.
Five people died when the Lankershim Boulevard bridge at Universal City collapsed into the rolling river rapids. Warner Bros. and Republic studios were isolated by the spreading water, which knocked out the Pacific Electric Red Cars and railroad lines. Downstream, the rampaging river collected the swollen Arroyo Seco, the Rio Hondo and the runaway flow of dozens of other creeks and pushed southward toward the sea.
Overflow inundated a swath of low-lying towns and farmland between downtown Los Angeles and the port at Long Beach. Away from the river, swollen creeks and washes flooded Venice, Echo Park and other areas of Los Angeles. In Orange County, the Santa Ana River rampaged across the coastal plain, submerging large areas beneath muddy water.
The rain stopped falling by 7 p.m. March 3, after dumping 11 inches in five days. But the mountains were not finished disgorging. The Los Angeles and the Santa Ana rivers continued to rise, sweeping dozens of victims to their deaths from Anaheim to Riverside.
At least 96 people died across Southern California, the toll scattered among several counties. The dead included five members of a family in North Hollywood; a family in Orange County lost three children. More than 1,500 homes in Los Angeles alone were rendered unlivable, and 3,700 residents were sheltered by relief agencies. Schools were closed for two days.
As bad as it was, hysterical radio reporters described catastrophes that never occurred. One announcer reported that Calabasas was wiped off the map. Another shrieked that an auto tunnel in Newhall had collapsed. It was true that so many Hollywood stars were stranded at their ranches in the Valley and elsewhere that the Academy Awards presentation scheduled at the downtown Biltmore Hotel was postponed for a week.
The 1938 flooding proved to be more than a tragedy or even a historic curiosity. It altered forever Southern California’s relationship with the elements.
Intense rainfall and flash flooding were as much a part of the region’s natural cycle as hot summers and Santa Ana winds. But this was the first major flood to occur since the population boom of the 1920s and ‘30s put neighborhoods in the path that storm runoff had followed for eons. Suddenly, the political will appeared to spend millions of dollars on a network of flood control dams and concrete channels that would become the Los Angeles area’s definition of a river.
The most dramatic result was the capture--some would argue the death--of the wild Los Angeles River. Rather than let the river meander between muddy banks lined with willow trees, barely a trickle in spots for most of the year, the channel was dug deeper and wider and encased in concrete.
Today, the volume of the river channel through the county seems absurdly large--and it is usually so dry that it has been suggested as a route for mass transit. But on those infrequent occasions when the trickle erupts into a torrent, the water stays contained.
It’s a trade-off Angelenos still do not fully accept. The river provided all the drinking water Los Angeles needed for more than a century, and supported enough steelhead that grizzly bears came out of the hills to feast on the trout. At the end of this century, people still debate whether to let the river run free again.
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03b0839e15bea151ba302873b86c37eb | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-25-me-26008-story.html | Actor Ford Unhurt in Copter Crash | Actor Ford Unhurt in Copter Crash
Like a daring climax to one of his hit movies, Harrison Ford and his flight instructor walked away from a helicopter crash this weekend in a dry riverbed after reportedly taking off from Van Nuys Airport, a Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman said.
The accident took place about 11:15 a.m. Saturday when the Bell 206 JetRanger helicopter carrying Ford and the unidentified instructor went down near Lake Piru about 45 miles northwest of Los Angeles, FAA Operations Officer Diana Joubert said.
After the helicopter took off from Van Nuys, it headed to the Ventura County site, where it was practicing auto rotations when the accident occurred, Joubert said.
Auto rotation is an emergency landing procedure that simulates engine failure. In the technique, the pilot disengages the main rotor blades from the engine. This helps the blades rotate on their own as the aircraft descends, greatly reducing the speed of the fall.
Joubert said it was not clear who was at the controls when the helicopter fell to the ground. But she said the craft sustained heavy damage after coming to rest on its left side.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the incident.
Ford has appeared in such cinematic blockbusters as both the original “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” trilogies and “Air Force One.” His two latest movies, “Six Days, Seven Nights” and the current “Random Hearts,” involve plane crashes.
Ventura County Fire Capt. Gary Rake of the Piru station said the Lake Piru area is attractive for aerobatic and training flights because few people live there.
Federal requirements forbid pilots from practicing such maneuvers over populated areas, he said.
Rake said he can’t remember any previous crashes in the area: “I’ve been on the department 30 years and I’m green on that one.”
He said he was unaware of Ford’s rough landing Saturday morning. “They didn’t go down in our area and generate an emergency call,” he said.
Preliminary reports show that the JetRanger was built in 1998 and registered to MG Aviation Inc. of Teterboro, N. J. Records show that the aircraft was registered to the company in March 1998.
Times Community News reporter Tony Lystra contributed to this story.
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a0c476792d70fd7aebc9dfb32263bf50 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-26-fi-26298-story.html | Berkshire-Led Group to Buy MidAmerican Energy | Berkshire-Led Group to Buy MidAmerican Energy
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is leading an investor group that agreed to buy MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co. for $2.05 billion in cash, marking the billionaire investor’s first foray into energy.
Berkshire Hathaway said the group will pay $35.05 a share, 29% more than Friday’s close. The Buffett group also will assume about $7 billion in debt. The group plans to take the company private.
Buffett is betting that MidAmerican’s natural gas and electricity business in the U.S. and Britain and its power plants in Asia are better long-term investments than the company’s stock performance suggests, analysts said. The shares have fallen 21% this year.
“We buy good companies with outstanding management and good growth potential at a fair price, and we’re willing to wait longer than some investors for that potential to be realized,” Buffett said. “This investment is right in our sweet spot.”
Berkshire Hathaway said it will invest about $1.25 billion in common stock and a non-dividend-paying convertible preferred stock of MidAmerican, giving Berkshire a 75% stake.
Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway also will buy $800 million of preferred stock. The other investors, who will invest about $300 million, are Omaha neighbors Walter Scott, former chairman of construction company Peter Kiewit Sons’ Inc. and MidAmerican’s largest individual shareholder, and David Sokol, chairman and chief executive of MidAmerican, which is based in Des Moines. Scott is a member of both Berkshire Hathaway’s and MidAmerican’s boards.
MidAmerican was formed when CalEnergy Co., an international power plant builder and operator, bought MidAmerican Energy Holdings, an Iowa electric utility, in March.
CalEnergy specialized in geothermal power plants, which use superheated pockets of water from deep in the Earth to generate electricity. Its first geothermal projects were in California.
After the company fell deep in debt in 1990, Peter Kiewit Sons’ bought a stake, andCalEnergy moved its headquarters from San Francisco to Omaha. The headquarters moved to Des Moines after CalEnergy bought MidAmerican, itself formed by the merger of three Midwestern utilities in 1995, and adopted its name this year.
The company expanded in the 1990s by building or buying more geothermal projects in the U.S., Philippines and Indonesia. It bought a controlling stake in Northern Utilities, a British utility that provides much of its revenue, in 1996.
MidAmerican shares rose $6.13 to close at 33.38 on the New York Stock Exchange.
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a43b3b70a7aef96b26d226406f48e6ae | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-28-hw-27158-story.html | Some Tips on Riding Out an Earthquake | Some Tips on Riding Out an Earthquake
Occasionally, as I drive over or under a freeway overpass in California, I’ll be hit with a sense of dread. All I can think of are those horrifying images of the collapsed Cypress Freeway that trapped and killed 42 people in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
Certainly I’m not alone in worrying about what could happen to drivers caught on the freeway when the next big quake strikes.
Unfortunately, we’re pretty much at the mercy of nature. There are no warnings. One minute we’re cruising down the freeway, the next thing the earth shakes, and that concrete marvel of a road collapses as it did a decade ago in Northern California.
But there are situations during a quake when drivers may well be in a position to avoid tragedy. So in the wake of the recent 7.1 Hector Mine temblor, here are some tips from the experts that could help protect motorists and their passengers, and possibly save their lives.
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Firefighter Mitch McKnight, an instructor with the Los Angeles City Fire Department’s disaster prevention unit, advises drivers who are caught on a freeway when a quake strikes to “slow down, go to the right side of the road and beware of any overhead hazards.”
“Don’t stop on or under an overpass,” he says, “and stay away from high-rise buildings, large trees or power lines.”
Drivers who are already on an overpass should try to get off as quickly as possible.
“That doesn’t mean throw the car into high gear. It means proceed with caution to a safe location,” he says.
Sounds like common sense. But whether it will work will depend on the circumstances.
“If it’s rush hour, for example, and you’ve got 600 cars behind you, it can be a real mess,” McKnight says.
If possible, he says, we should avoid driving immediately after an earthquake because of the risk of aftershocks and road damage.
“A lot of people like to take their car and go sightseeing. But it’s a foolish thing to do because you don’t know when an aftershock could come,” McKnight says.
Roadway and structural damage, no matter how minor it may appear, can pose a serious danger right after a quake, cautions Tim Maley, a public affairs officer for the California Highway Patrol. It is best to wait until the roadway can be examined by a CHP officer or state Department of Transportation worker.
“At first blush, what might seem to be a minor crack in the road or a separation of two bridge joints could have significantly weakened the structure to the point where if you [add] the weight of an automobile or a truck, it could cause it to fail,” Maley says.
Los Angeles Police Officer Clarence Wayne Dean lost his life shortly after the Northridge quake of 1994 when his motorcycle plunged off a collapsed interchange of the Golden State and Antelope Valley freeways.
Dean was rushing from his home in Lancaster to report for emergency duty when he failed to see the severed roadway in the predawn light.
Olga Robles Uribe died in an automobile accident right after the earthquake. Worried about her 10-month-old son, she left work to pick him up. The car in which she was a passenger hit a fissure in the road caused by the quake and flipped over twice on San Fernando Road in Sylmar. The 26-year-old mother was dead at the scene.
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The CHP does not compile statistics on earthquake-related vehicle deaths and injuries in California. But the Western Insurance Information Service, an education and research group, reports that the Northridge quake alone generated 33,249 personal and commercial automobile insurance claims for a total loss of $58.2 million.
The claims, says spokeswoman Stephanie Macadaan, covered incidents ranging from roadway accidents to vehicle damage caused by falling trees, buildings and debris.
Macadaan urges motorists who are caught in an earthquake to stay inside their vehicles until the shaking stops and then listen to the radio for updates on road conditions, gas leaks or other possible hazards.
Motorists should also be prepared by carrying emergency supplies in the car, firefighter McKnight advises, suggesting such items as a first-aid kit, a flashlight, a portable radio, batteries, a change of clothes, comfortable walking shoes and a supply of water and food.
Comfortable shoes are important, he says, “because if the roads are damaged and you can’t get through in a car, you are probably going to end up walking to shelter.” The radio could prove to be the driver’s only link to post-quake news updates.
McKnight also reminds people who use prescription medication to pack an extra supply in their emergency car kits.
In addition, he advises drivers to keep emergency supplies at work “because, if the roads are impassable, you may have to stay at your office for a few days.”
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The bottom line is it’s necessary for “folks to take responsibility for themselves and not just rely on the government to be there for them” should a big quake occur, the CHP’s Maley says.
If we get hit with a magnitude 8 or stronger quake, he says, “you’re going to have mass devastation, and the emergency preparedness network is going to be taxed.”
“People are going to have to be self-sufficient until law enforcement and emergency help can get there.”
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Jeanne Wright cannot answer mail personally but responds in this column to automotive questions of general interest. Write to Your Wheels, Business Section, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053. E-mail: highway1@latimes.com.
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37625bcba5d33fe56962e6a375348175 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-29-me-27493-story.html | Where’s the Evidence of Genocide of Kosovar Albanians? | Where’s the Evidence of Genocide of Kosovar Albanians?
So, is there serious evidence of a Serbian campaign of genocide in Kosovo? It’s an important issue because the NATO powers, fortified by a chorus from the liberal intelligentsia, flourished the charge of genocide as justification for bombing that destroyed much of Serbia’s economy and killed about 2,000 civilians.
Whatever horrors they may have been planning, the Serbs were not engaged in genocidal activities in Kosovo before the bombing began. They were fighting a separatist movement, led by the Kosovo Liberation Army, and behaving with the brutality typical of security forces. One common estimate of the number of Kosovar Albanians killed in the year before the bombing is 2,500. With NATO’s bombing came the flights and expulsions and charges that the Serbs were accelerating a genocidal plan; in some accounts, as many as 100,000 were already dead. An alternative assessment was that NATO’s bombing was largely to blame for the expulsions and killings.
After the war was over, on June 25, President Clinton told a White House news conference that tens of thousands of people had been killed in Kosovo on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s orders. A week before came the statement from Geoff Hoon of the British Foreign Office that, according to reports, mostly from refugees, it appeared that about 10,000 Kosovar Albanians had been killed in more than 100 massacres.
Of course, the U.S. and British governments had an obvious motive in painting as horrifying a picture as possible of what the Serbs had been up to, since the bombing had come under increasingly fierce attack, with rifts in the NATO alliance.
The NATO powers had plenty of reasons to rush charges of genocide into the headlines. For one thing, it was becoming embarrassingly clear that the bombing had inflicted no significant damage on the Serbian army. All the more reason, therefore, to propose that the Serbs, civilians as well as soldiers, were collectively guilty of genocide and thus deserved everything they got.
Teams of forensic investigators from 15 nations, including a detachment from the FBI, have been at work since June and have examined about 150 of 400 sites of alleged mass murder.
There’s still immense uncertainty, but at this point it’s plain that there are not enough bodies to warrant the claim that the Serbs had a program of extermination. The FBI team has made two trips to Kosovo and investigated 30 sites containing nearly 200 bodies.
In early October, the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported what the Spanish forensic team had found in its appointed zone in northern Kosovo. The U.N. figures, said Perez Pujol, director of the Instituto Anatomico Forense de Cartagena, began with 44,000 dead, dropped to 22,000 and now stand at 11,000. He and his fellows were prepared to perform at least 2,000 autopsies in their zone. So far, they’ve found 187 corpses.
A colleague of Pujol, Juan Lopez Palafox, told El Pais that he had the impression that the Serbs had given families the option of leaving. If they refused or came back, they were killed. Like any murder of civilians, these were war crimes, just as any mass grave, whatever the number of bodies, indicates a massacre. But genocide?
One persistent story held that 700 Kosovars had been dumped in the Trepca lead and zinc mines. On Oct. 12, Kelly Moore, a spokeswoman for the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, announced that the investigators had found absolutely nothing. There was a mass grave allegedly containing 350 bodies in Ljubenic that turned out to hold seven. In Pusto Selo, villagers said 106 had been killed by the Serbs, and NATO rushed out satellite photos of mass graves. Nothing to buttress that charge has yet been found. Another 82 Kosovars allegedly were killed in Kraljan. No bodies have been turned up.
Although surely by now investigators would have been pointed to all probable sites, it’s conceivable that thousands of Kosovar corpses await discovery. As matters stand, though, the number of bodies turned up by the tribunal’s teams is in the hundreds, not thousands, which tends to confirm the view of those who hold that NATO bombing provoked a wave of Serbian killings and expulsions, but that there was and is no hard evidence of a genocidal program.
Count another victory for the Big Lie. Meanwhile, the normally reliable Society for Endangered People in Germany says 90,000 Gypsies have been forced to flee since the Serbs left Kosovo, with the KLA conducting ethnic cleansing on a grand scale. But who cares about Gypsies?
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6a00db580b7d19732b672168a6020ad2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-29-me-27668-story.html | Overlooked Film’s Animators Created a Giant | Overlooked Film’s Animators Created a Giant
When the nominations for the Annies--the animation industry’s equivalent of the Academy Awards--were announced recently, the big winner was “The Iron Giant.” The Warner Bros. film garnered a remarkable 15 nominations, including best animated feature, best director and three nominations for best character animation.
To put that number in perspective, “The Iron Giant” received more nominations than DreamWorks’ “The Prince of Egypt” and Disney’s “Tarzan” put together.
Unfortunately, hardly anyone saw “The Iron Giant,” despite its having received reverential reviews. Under-promoted by Warner Bros., it opened in August and quickly disappeared. Last time I checked, it was playing in just three discount theaters in Greater Los Angeles.
But when you talk to the people who made “The Iron Giant,” you hear few complaints. No one is happy that the Burbank-based studio chose to put its promotion money behind “Wild, Wild West” and other forgettable films. But the people who made “The Iron Giant” have something better than a hit on their hands. They have the satisfaction of having made a great movie and having had a great time doing it.
Like many other animators, Annie nominee Steve Markowski lives in Valencia, not far from the CalArts campus from which most of the industry’s best animators flow.
Based on a novel by Ted Hughes, written to comfort their children after Hughes’ estranged wife, poet Sylvia Plath, committed suicide, “The Iron Giant” is the story of a boy, named Hogarth Hughes, and his buddy, a 50-foot robot from outer space.
In most animated features a single animator is responsible for a particular character. In “The Iron Giant,” however, director Brad Bird gave animators chunks of film rather than one character to animate. The exception was Markowski, who did most of the work on the giant robot.
As Markowski explains, the robot was computer animated, in contrast to the other principals, who were drawn the old-fashioned way.
“The biggest challenge,” he recalls, “was getting a lot of emotion and acting out of a big metal character.”
To make sure the computer creature and the hand-drawn characters were integrated stylistically, he made printouts of the giant and the other animators often drew directly on them.
Although the project meant “my wife was widowed for a year,” Markowski has no regrets. Bird, he says, “is an inspirational director” who created an atmosphere in which everyone’s energy went into “what was best for the picture,” not intramural competition.
“Of course, everybody was disappointed” by the lack of promotion the film received, he says. “Had it been given a Disney push, it would have made Disney dollars, I think; the movie is of that quality.”
But the reviews are vindication (“I think it might be the best-reviewed movie of the year”), and there is hope of an Oscar nomination. Even Hughes, who died last year, was reported to have liked the picture.
Dean Wellins was also nominated for character animation on “The Iron Giant.” Another CalArts guy, Wellins is currently at work in the Warner animation studio in Sherman Oaks on a feature called “Osmosis Jones,” about “a white blood cell who’s a cop and who’s running down a virus” inside a human body--a perfect example of what only an animated film can do.
Wellins recalls that Bird managed to make everyone feel the film was his or her baby, as well as Bird’s. An animator himself, Bird filled the movie with fun scenes to animate, Wellins says. The piece of the movie that he most thinks of as his own is the scene in which the boy and his giant play in the lake, which draws on his memories of splashing in various lakes in the Sierra.
Unlike most directors, Wellins says, “Bird really asked, ‘What do you think?’ and he really meant ‘What do you think?’ ” If one of the other members of the production crew came up with a better idea, Bird would change the film accordingly.
“As easy and simple as that sounds, it’s really rare,” Wellins says.
A cartooning wunderkind, Bird introduced himself to the Disney studio when he was 11 years old. He returned when he was 14, and even though he was too young to work on an actual film, the studio turned him over to legendary animator Milt Kahl to mentor.
Bird was one of a group of greatly talented animators who experienced enormous frustration at Disney during the fallow period before Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg revitalized feature animation in the 1980s and 1990s.
Fired after two years “for rocking the boat,” Bird says, he and the other rebels struggled with a hierarchy that lacked the greatness of earlier Disney animators.
“The whole corporate outlook in a nutshell was ‘Let’s not screw it up,’ ” Bird recalls. That regime refused to share power with the younger talent, avoided risk-taking and put every aspect of feature filmmaking through the blanderizer.
You can see the results of that philosophy in the 1981 Disney film “The Fox and the Hound,” Bird says. The only part of the movie that comes alive is the bear fight, which was left the way its gifted animators drew it because the release date loomed.
“They didn’t have time to ruin it, as they did the rest of the movie.”
In making “The Iron Giant,” Bird tried to remain open to input of others in the group.
“I think it’s a mistake to hire talented people and then never allow them to express their individual point of view.” He also made it a point to spread the choice animation jobs around.
“Everyone got to do something fun,” he says.
At Disney, he recalls, great talent was often wasted on animating minor characters. He tried to make sure that even relatively green animators had important work to do.
“They really rose to the occasion,” he says of the mostly young crew, many of whom came to the project still demoralized from their involvement in last year’s animated flop “Quest for Camelot.”
If you let your top talent monopolize the best assignments, he says, “You overburden your strongest people and underburden the others.”
Although he’s sorry the film wasn’t marketed better, he’s grateful for the freedom Warner Bros. gave him in making it.
“I think there are two sides to the flying-under-the-radar coin,” he says. “We were left to our own devices while making the film, which was wonderful, but we were also left to our own devices when it came to promoting it.”
And yet “with one-third the money and one-half the time” most major animated features require, the group made a movie that may have a life in video as long as “Bambi.”
“I’m very proud of our team,” Bird says.
And so, obviously, is the animation industry.
The 27th Annual Annie Awards, sponsored by ASIFA-Hollywood, will be held the evening of Nov. 6 at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. For ticket information, call (818) 842-8330.
Spotlight runs each Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.
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6ce48baf0cc59291d74b0d343fc39507 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-30-fi-27769-story.html | McDonnell Douglas, Chinese Plead Not Guilty | McDonnell Douglas, Chinese Plead Not Guilty
McDonnell Douglas Corp. and a Chinese government-owned company pleaded not guilty to charges they conspired to divert sophisticated machine tools to the Chinese military in violation of U.S. export laws. The pleas were entered by attorneys representing McDonnell Douglas, which was acquired by Boeing Co. in 1997, and China’s National Aero-Technology Import Export Corp., known as CATIC, during a brief court arraignment in Washington. Robert Hitt, director of McDonnell Douglas’ China program office, also pleaded not guilty and was released without bail, though he did have to turn over his passport to his lawyer and was required to give prosecutors 24 hours’ notice before traveling abroad. Two other defendants, both Chinese citizens employed by CATIC, did not appear at the hearing. U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman said he would issue arrest warrants for them. The two executives are believed to be in China. The 16-count indictment alleged that the defendants made false and misleading statements and key omissions about the export by McDonnell Douglas to the Chinese company in 1994 and 1995 of 13 pieces of state-of-the-art equipment that was supposed to be used to build commercial aircraft parts. Some of the equipment ended up at a military project in Nanchang, China, where missiles and attack aircraft are made, according to the indictment that was handed up last week.
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0ce0acd1dc88ebd8c76c4e87b352f334 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-sep-01-ca-5531-story.html | Parents Council Says TV’s ‘Family Hour’ Now Raunchier | Parents Council Says TV’s ‘Family Hour’ Now Raunchier
The first hour of prime time--once set aside in the mid-1970s for family viewing--experienced a marked increase in sexual content, foul language and violence during the last year, according to the Parents Television Council, an organization lobbying to reinstate the so-called family viewing hour.
The group, an adjunct of conservative advocate L. Brent Bozell’s Washington, D.C.-based Media Research Center, based its conclusions on the study of a two-week period in May, which was compared with a similar window in February 1998. Both fell during sweeps periods, when the networks attempt to boost their ratings so affiliates can charge the highest advertising rates.
The survey, released Tuesday, concluded that more than two-thirds of shows scheduled between 8 and 9 p.m. in the Eastern and Pacific time zones contain sexual material parents may find objectionable, and nearly half featured some coarse language. By comparison, the study noted a relatively spare 35% of network shows contained violence, though the group maintains that marks an increase compared with 1998.
CBS programming was found to contain the most violence at 8 p.m., prompting a network spokesman to deem the survey’s findings “completely misguided.” The network pointed out that only one CBS program airing at 8 p.m., “JAG,” featured any significant amount of violence, with such family-oriented fare as “Cosby,” “Touched by an Angel” and the since-canceled “Promised Land” leading off other nights.
Perhaps foremost, the Parents Television Council expressed concern that the coming season will be even more objectionable in terms of what’s acceptable at 8 p.m., with UPN scheduling a new wrestling show and five series that previously aired at 9 p.m. or later--"Spin City,” “The Norm Show,” “Veronica’s Closet,” “Just Shoot Me” and “Felicity"--all moving into an earlier time slot.
Notably, violence is not the issue in relation to those programs, which may reflect heightened sensitivity among programmers on that score in the wake of concerns voiced about the media’s influence on societal violence.
Even so, the council’s executive director, Mark Honig, cited a heightened reliance on “cheap sexual humor” as programs developed to air in later time slots keep being shifted into the 8 p.m. hour.
The survey determined that Fox airs the most offensive material, with at least something researchers deemed objectionable for family viewing in all of its 8 p.m. series. Fox’s lineup during May featured such shows as “Melrose Place,” “Cops” and the special “Surviving the Moment of Impact.”
According to the survey, NBC ranked second in terms of total objectionable content between 8 and 9 p.m., followed by UPN, the WB, ABC and CBS.
William Blinn, a veteran TV writer who recently joined the council’s advisory board, said he did so out of “a sense the quality of television was becoming increasingly rude, insensitive and ‘in your face’ for its own sake.” Steve Allen is among the show-business personalities who have joined in the cause, becoming the group’s honorary chairman.
The council rated about one in four prime-time programs shown at 8 p.m. on the networks appropriate for family viewing, down from one-third in the previous study. Although the “family viewing hour” was ruled unconstitutional, the Parents Television Council and some legislators have been pushing for the networks to voluntarily adopt such a code.
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96f137c100d07352e487b3c651c3a0e1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-sep-04-me-6810-story.html | Stanley Weigel; Longtime Federal Judge | Stanley Weigel; Longtime Federal Judge
Stanley Weigel, an irascible liberal whose three decades as a federal judge in San Francisco brought major rulings on school desegregation and the rights of prisoners and the elderly, died Wednesday at his home in the Russian Hill section of the city. He was 93.
After his appointment to the federal bench in 1962, he built a reputation as an old-style constitutional liberal who often was hot-tempered in court when faced with an ill-prepared attorney. His rulings were rarely reversed and reflected his fundamental belief in fairness and compassion for society’s underdogs.
Weigel garnered attention as a lawyer when he agreed to defend 39 University of California professors who had refused to sign anti-communist loyalty oaths during the Red-baiting era of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Their cases had been rejected by most of the downtown lawyers in San Francisco. But Weigel, a registered Republican who defended blue-chip firms in antitrust suits, scored a victory in what became a liberal cause celebre, winning reinstatement for all the professors.
“That case was typical of his absolute fearlessness,” said U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William Fletcher, who served as Weigel’s clerk in the 1970s. “If the clients were in the right, that was all he needed to know.”
Through the UC loyalty case, Weigel became a friend of Pierre Salinger, the Bay Area journalist who later became President John F. Kennedy’s press secretary. Salinger introduced Weigel to Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy, who recommended judicial candidates to the president.
Weigel, a Stanford Law School graduate who was born in Helena, Mont., loved to tell this story about how his judgeship was secured:
"[Robert] Kennedy was wearing a turtleneck sweater and had a football and threw it at me as I walked in the door, and I caught it,” he told an interviewer in 1995. “That’s how I became a federal judge.”
He developed a reputation as a staunch advocate for the underdog, a characterization that the often-cantankerous jurist probably would not have disputed. “On social issues,” he said a few years ago, “I’m a liberal.”
Weigel made many hugely unpopular rulings.
In 1970 he blocked a massive redevelopment project in San Francisco that would have forced the eviction of elderly residents. The Yerba Buena development, which would replace low-income apartments with hotels and tourist attractions, was held up for years until the elderly residents were provided alternative housing.
In 1971, during a period of racial unrest around the country, Weigel ordered busing to desegregate San Francisco schools. At that time the city was the most populous in the country to use busing to achieve desegregation.
In 1984, he ordered reforms at two of California’s maximum-security prisons, placing Folsom and San Quentin under a permanent injunction to remedy conditions he described as so cramped, filthy and hazardous that they constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Among the improvements he ordered was a halt to the practice of confining two dangerous prisoners to a cell “the size of a dog kennel.” His ruling helped set a standard for prison supervision that remained effective until the early 1990s.
Weigel was still hearing cases two years ago. At the time, he was considered the oldest District Court judge to maintain an ample civil and criminal caseload that included presiding over trials.
Before he retired, many members of the San Francisco bar grumbled that he was no longer capable of running long, complex trials and complained that his habit of berating lawyers, litigants and sometimes jurors was getting out of hand.
But Weigel, although sensitive to the complaints, told the Recorder, a San Francisco-based legal newspaper, in 1995 that he was still equal to the demands of the federal bench.
“If I didn’t feel I was able to continue, I’d get the hell out,” he said. “But I expect to die with my boots on. I think I have the best job in the world.”
He continued to hear cases until he was 91, when his frail health finally forced him to retire completely. He is survived by his wife, Anne; daughter Susan Pasternak of Cambridge, Mass.; and four grandchildren.
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59303c7c3cccb9730a6745686aa0a3dc | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-sep-05-tv-11386-story.html | COVER STORY : Boys & Girls : Start Your Remotes! | COVER STORY : Boys & Girls : Start Your Remotes!
The fall season of children’s television features a fresh mix of familiar comic book faces: Sabrina, Spider Man, Archie and the gang, as well as several educational series for the preschool set. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary sleuth; Sherlock Holmes, has been rejuvenated for youngsters.
The season also marks the launch of Bobber Entertainment and Media’s BKN, the Bohbot Kids Network. The flagship BKN service, Bulldog TV, targets boys ages 6-11.
Here’s an overview of what’s new for kids this fall:
Network
ABC
“Sabrina, the Animated Series”: Based on characters in the Archie Comics, this animated
“‘prequel” to the ABC primetime series features “Sabrina” star Melissa Joan Hart as the voice of Aunt Zelda and Aunt Hilda. Hart’s 13-year-old sister Emily who provides the voice of the young Sabrina, won’t get her powers until she’s 16. The series joins ABC;"s “‘One Saturday Morning” lineup. Saturdays at 9:30 a.m. on Sept. 11: weekdays at 7:30 a.m. and Sundays on URN at 10 a.m. as part of “Disney’s One Too” animation block. Sept. 6.
CBS
“Blaster’s Universe”: First an educational CD-ROM series, this animated show follows the adventures of an Earth boy and alien girl who use problem-solving to save the Earth from space villains. Saturdays at 7:30 a.m. Oct. 2.
“Rescue Heroes”: Animated series about a group of heroic characters who promote safety first” during their successful and elaborate rescue missions. Saturdays at 8 a.m. Oct. 2
“New Tales From the Cryptkeeper’: The ghoulish one is host, storyteller and participant in these morality tales that emphasize values for children. Satur day at 9 a.m.
Oct. 2
Fox
“BeastWars”: Animated series set in mysterious world where wild animals transform into robot warriors to battle evil enemies for control of their energy source and freedom. Weekdays at 3:30 p.m. Sept. 13.
“Digimon: Digital Monsters”: Seven youngsters befriend small digital monsters and team up to unveil the mystery of the black force. Weekdays at 4 p.m. Sept. 13.
“Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century”: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famed literary detective is brought back to life--thanks to Inspector Beth Lestrade--and rejuvenated as a 25-year-old. The educational animated series emphasizes critical thinking, problem-solving and social values. Saturdays at 7 a.m. Sept. 18.
“Beast Machines”: The “Beast Wars” characters fight against an evil dragon an his minions in this animated program laced with humor. Saturdays at 10 a.m. Sept. 18.
“Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot”: Based on the Dark Horse comic book, the animated action-adventure series follows two robots who are entrusted with defending the world against evil. Saturdays at 10:30 a.m. Sept. 18.
“Xyber 9": Mysterious saga about a young man who is assisted on a journey to be king by a super computer and powerful friends. Saturdays at 8:30 a.m. Sept. 25.
“The Avengers”: Animated series based on the 1963 Marvel Comics about a team of superheroes based in New York City in the high-tech future. Saturdays at 9:30 a.m. Sept. 25.
“Spider-Man Unlimited”: All new escapades of the famed web-crawler, Peter Parker. Saturdays at 9 a.m. Oct. 2.
KCET
“Dragon Tales”: Animated series focusing on the adventures of a 6-year-old girl and her younger brother who discover a magic dragon in the playroom of their new home. Sept. 6 from 7:30 to 10 a.m.; moves to its regular time slot, weekdays at 8 a.m., on Sept. 7.
WB
“Detention”: Animated comedy offers an insider’s look at a middle school’s “lovable outsiders"--eight preteens who regularly get detention after school. Tia and Tamera Mowry supply the voices of twin sisters Lemonjella and Orangella. Saturdays at 9:30 a.m. Sept. 11.
Cable I
Cartoon Network
“Mike, Lu & Og”: Cartoon series about a sophisticated New York girl who leaves her home as an exchange student to live life on a native island. Nov. 12.
“Courage, the Cowardly Dog”: Created, written and directed by John R. Dilworth, the series focuses on a timid dog who must defend an old farm couple from paranormal elements. The pilot received an Oscar nomination in 1996 for best animated short. Nov. 12.
Disney Channel
“The Jersey”: Live-action sports series follows the coming of age of a 13-year-old boy and his girl cousin who jump into the lives of a variety of sports heroes. Fridays and Saturdays at 6:30 and 11.30 p.m. Sept. 24.
Fox Family Channel
“It’s itsy bitsy Time”: Preschool block that combines a mix of live-action, traditional and stop-action animations for the little ones. Weekdays at 9 and 11.30 a.m. Sept. 6.
“Jellabies”: These six bounceable and stretchable characters with the ability to make everyone smile live in the land of Jelly in this 3-D animated series with music for the preschool set. Weekdays at 12:50 Am. Sept. 6.
“Angela Anaconda”: Gutout-style animated series features 8-year-old Angela as she competes with her archrival by creating payback fantasies. Saturdays at 9:30 a. m. and 1 p.m.; Sundays at I p.m.; and Thursdays at 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. Oct 9.
“Weird Ohs”: Animated comedy taking place along Route 66, where cars rule and racing is a way of life. Saturdays and Sundays at noon and Tuesdays at 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. Oct 9.
“Mega Babies”: Animated series about three babies on a mission to protect Earth from evil forces from outer space. Sundays at 9 a.m. and Mondays at 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. Oct. 10.
‘The Kids From Room 402': Animated series about a classroom full of 10-year-old eccentrics. Based on the book “Gracie Graves and the Kids from Room 402.” Saturdays at 9 a.m. and 12.30 p.m.; Sundays at 12:30 p.m. and Wednesdays at 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. Oct. 9
“S Club 7 in Miami”: Live-action series follows the exploits of the seven-member British pop band who go to Miami for their big break. Saturdays at 11 a.m. and Fridays at 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. Nov. 6.
Nickelodeon
“Nickelodeon Rocket Power”: From Klasky Cause, the animators of “Rugrats,” comes the animated exploits of four loyal friends who love the ultimate adrenaline rush of adventures. Mondays and Wednesdays at 8.30 p.m. Already premiered.
“100 Deeds for Eddie McDowd”: Live-action comedy about a bully named Eddie who is turned into a dog by a mysterious drifter after the boy gives the man a hard time. Eddie must perform 100 good deeds before he sheds his canine fur. Saturdays at 9 p. a. Oct. 9.
“Little Bill”: Bill Cosby’s new animated series is based on his popular children’s book chronicling the escapades of an energetic 5-year-old as he learns about the world around him. Sundays at 8 p.m. Nov. 7.
Pax TV
“Archie’s Weird Mysteries”: A sci-fi twist on the classic Archie Comics. In this animated series, Archie’s hometown of Riverdale is altered after a high school experiment goes awry, creating a magnetic field that attracts abnormal creatures and people. Saturdays at 7 a.m. Already premiered.
Bulldog TV
(Network for Boys)
“Monster Rancher”: Animated series about two kids who are transported into the Monster Rancher video game, trying to escape the clutches of a monster who has plans to conquer the world. Weekdays at 7 a.m. KCAL. Sept. 7.
“Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles”: Based on the novel and 1997 feature, this computer-animated series hangs with the Starship Troopers-Rico, DIZZY and Carl-as they travel the galaxy protecting humans everywhere from insectoid alien invaders. Weekdays at 7.30 a.m. KCAL. Sept. 7.
“Double Dragon”: The story of identical twin orphans who were separated when they were young after one was stolen by evil brothers. The other one was trained in the martial arts and is steeped in the nonviolent code of the dragon. Sundays at 7 a.m. on KCOP. Sept. 5.
“Rambo: The Animated Series”: The character made famous by Sylvester Stations returns as the leader of an undercover strike force in this animated action-adventure. Sundays at 7.30 a.m. on KCOP Sept. 5.
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1e91a5a61944ca63f8dc73195c6403c4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-sep-14-fi-10095-story.html | California Pizza Kitchen Tries the Frozen Food Aisle | California Pizza Kitchen Tries the Frozen Food Aisle
In a 30-second television commercial filmed on the beach in Santa Monica, casually dressed California Pizza Kitchen co-founders Larry Flax and Rick Rosenfield mug for the cameras in a fast-paced spot touting their new line of frozen gourmet pizzas.
The pizzas, which made their debut Monday in Southern California supermarkets, will be promoted by a print and TV campaign that starts Nov. 1 and puts the outgoing duo back in the spotlight for the first time since they appeared in an American Express commercial nationwide five years ago.
Flax, Rosenfield and CPK were last in the national limelight in 1997, and then only briefly, when soft-drink giant PepsiCo Inc. sold its 67% stake in Los Angeles-based CPK to the New York investment firm of Bruckmann, Rosser, Sherrill & Co. Flax and Rosenfield own 24% of the company and are board co-chairmen.
The pair will be the focal point of the upcoming advertising campaign, which, as with the manufacturer of the pizza, is being handled by a unit of giant Kraft Foods Inc.
“The restaurant is clearly the personalities of both Rick and Larry,” said Carlos Abrams-Rivera, senior brand manager for Illinois-based Kraft Pizza Co. “They have such passion in what they do and such a belief in their product that I think it is contagious, and it is easy for people to be attracted to that.”
The television spot, developed with the Chicago advertising firm Foote, Cone & Belding, will run on cable TV in Southern California until at least early next year. The spot is hip and fast-paced, with the theme “Cool New Way to Pizza.” Kraft wouldn’t say how much it’s spending on the campaign.
The introduction of the frozen pizza line, of which there are seven varieties, each selling for $4.99 at most major Southland grocery chains, faces strong competition from items from Los Angeles celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck. Puck introduced his line of frozen gourmet pizzas more than a decade ago, and his name is synonymous with trendy California cuisine.
Flax and Rosenfield are hoping to overcome any disadvantage by teaming with Kraft, the nation’s largest maker of frozen pizzas, with 37% of the $2-billion market. Kraft “has fantastic sales distribution capability versus the way Wolfgang has tried to do it, which is pretty much on his own,” said Ronald Paul, president of Technomic, a Chicago-based food industry consultant.
Kraft is making the pizzas under a licensing deal with CPK, which will get a small percentage of the pizzas’ sales. CPK joins a parade of restaurants that are already selling their fare in supermarkets, including Puck’s; Orange-based Marie Callender’s; and Claim Jumper, El Torito and Taco Bell, all based in Irvine.
Officials at Santa Monica-based Wolfgang Puck Food Co., which produces 11 varieties of frozen gourmet pizzas, declined to comment on CPK’s foray into supermarkets.
For Kraft, CPK will be the fourth brand of frozen pizza that the company makes and markets. The others are Tombstone, DiGiorno and Jack’s Pizza, which is a regional brand sold in the Midwest.
Kevin Scott, general manager of Kraft Pizza Co., said he doesn’t expect CPK to take away from the company’s best-selling DiGiorno and Tombstone brands because the gourmet pizzas have vastly different toppings than the traditional pepperoni and sausage. “We think of ourselves as trying to [expand] the category,” Scott said.
CPK’s entry to the freezer aisle will mark the third time Kraft Foods has distributed the product of an established restaurant or coffee brand in supermarkets. The company markets a line of Mexican foods for Taco Bell and coffee for Seattle-based Starbucks Corp.
Among other things, Flax and Rosenfield are betting that the line will help boost sales at CPK restaurants, which saw sales at stores open at least a year--a key measure of growth--rise 6% last year.
In San Francisco, Sacramento and Atlanta, where the frozen pizzas were test marketed, sales at CPK restaurants grew an additional 2% to 3%, said Fred Hipp, CPK’s chief executive.
CPK might be the newcomer in the grocery aisles, but its restaurant operations dwarf Puck’s Wolfgang Puck Cafes, which include 11 in Southern California, 20 overall and annual sales estimated by Technomic at $52.8 million in 1998. CPK, by comparison, has 30 Southland eateries, 94 restaurants in 20 states and annual sales of $193 million, which includes franchises. Both Puck and CPK are privately owned and do not disclose profits.
Flax and Rosenfield, both former federal prosecutors who later went into private practice together, exchanged their briefcases for pizza dough and opened their first CPK in 1984 in Beverly Hills.
Since the 1997 sale of the company, Flax and Rosenfield have added 22 new restaurants and plan to add increase that number by about 20% annually, primarily in markets CPK has proved popular.
Notes
Interpublic Group of Cos. said it has settled a lawsuit lodged by former Western Initiative Media executive Michael Kassan, who sued the media giant in July, alleging breach of contract and defamation of character. Interpublic, the parent company of Western Initiative, and Kassan, formerly Western’s president of U.S. operations, declined to comment on terms of the settlement. However, Interpublic said it had completed a regularly scheduled audit of the financial operations of Western and was satisfied with the results. Kassan earlier had alleged that the company was using the audit to look for evidence of wrongdoing that could be used to negate a long-term contract Kassan recently had signed. Kassan had sought $63.5 million in damages in two legal actions brought against Interpublic. (Greg Johnson)
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7e2e736624701f9e90199321a03c610f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-sep-14-mn-9950-story.html | Matthew Shepard’s Mother Aims to Speak With His Voice | Matthew Shepard’s Mother Aims to Speak With His Voice
She is fine-featured and wary. Mostly wary. Judy Shepard, the reluctant activist, is still coming to terms with this business of public revelation, public grief and public debate, a role thrust upon her after the brutal murder of her son last October.
Matthew Shepard’s death in Laramie became a nexus for hot-button issues of the day: gay rights, hate crimes and the death penalty among them. After watching in silent horror since then as her son’s death has been co-opted by special-interest groups she’d never heard of, she has been seeking to set the record straight--talking about her son, blemishes and all--hoping, perhaps, to make a difference.
“Having always been a very private person and a very private family, who has never been in the public eye, it’s been a little scary,” Judy Shepard said, sitting down to a rare interview. She lives in Saudi Arabia, where her husband, Dennis, works for Aramco, the government-owned oil company, but for months she has been camping out in a hotel room in Casper. She was in Jackson recently, visiting her brother.
“When we found out that [the murder] was in the national press, I got physically ill,” she said, speaking in a barely audible voice. “It was every mother’s worst nightmare out there for everyone’s perusal and prurient interest.
“The one thing I’ve learned is that my little voice is the only thing I have working for me. I am not an assertive person. I’m pretty shy. But I have realized that people would listen to what I had to say. There can be a period in time where I can make a difference. I feel compelled to do this for Matt. I feel compelled to do this for other parents. I feel compelled to do this for myself, because it helps to focus. Without it, I think I would just be in my bed.”
What Judy Shepard is doing is lending her support to causes that would have meant something to her son, a 21-year-old student at the University of Wyoming who was singled out for robbery and murder because he was gay. She recently taped two public service announcements for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay and lesbian political organization. The commercials will begin to air next month.
Judy Shepard, 47, who calls herself an “ordinary, average, middle-class mom,” has embarked on a path for which her life as stay-at-home mother did not prepare her. She has established the Matthew Shepard Foundation to foster tolerance and diversity; although it is currently little more than a mission statement, she said her idea is to offer children a haven.
“Our intention is to aid groups that otherwise would not get funding,” she said. “The goal is to help kids, not necessarily gay kids, but all kids. People forget that kids need places to be together, places they can feel safe.”
Safety issues have weighed heavily on her mind since her son’s death. His killers selected him in part because he was diminutive--5 feet, 2 inches--and also because of his fearlessness with strangers. Authorities allege that Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney spotted him in a Laramie bar, lured him to a remote spot and beat him, leaving him tied to a fence for 18 hours. He bled profusely during a freezing night and was found by a bicyclist the evening of the next day. He was hospitalized but never regained consciousness.
Henderson has pleaded guilty to murder. Jury selection in McKinney’s trial begins in Laramie on Oct. 11, a day before the anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death.
Victimized Before
It was not the first time in his life that her son had been attacked. He was raped in Morocco as a high school student and years later beaten by a man who claimed her son had made advances toward him, she said. Judy Shepard said she was aware of gay-bashing and worried for her son because “sometimes his sense about people was the right one and sometimes it was off.”
“He was always very small, but he never let that affect the way he would speak his mind,” she said. “If he saw an injustice, he was right there in the middle of it--a small child, but big vocally. I’d think, ‘Oh, jeez, somebody’s going to knock him. He’s going to smart off to someone.’ He really had a talent for that. I did worry about his safety. He was unafraid. I don’t ever remember Matt being afraid of anything most of his life.”
Matthew Shepard began high school in Casper, then moved with his family to Saudi Arabia. He graduated from an international high school in Switzerland after traveling the world on class trips, learning three languages and developing his interest in politics and humanitarian causes.
Judy Shepard speaks of her son with a parent’s pride and describes him with an urgency, as if she could conjure him with words.
“We talked about him being gay and finding a gay community,” she said. Her son came out to his family while he was in high school. The parents suggested that he attend the University of Wyoming--their alma mater--because Laramie is a small, friendly town and because the campus has a gay and lesbian group.
“I knew there was a safety being in a gay community, that there’s physical safety in numbers. I’ve said that he had the walk of a victim. He had an air of, ‘I’m open to speaking to you. You can hurt me if you want. You can pick on me and get away with it.’ I thought that if I could see it, other people could see it. It worried me.”
She always ended their frequent phone conversations with: “I love you. Be smart and be safe.”
The parents’ worst fears were realized when they received a phone call in the middle of the night telling them their son had been attacked. It took the Shepards nearly two days of traveling from Saudi Arabia to get to the hospital in Fort Collins, Colo., where their son lay in a coma. He had been so savagely beaten that Judy Shepard recognized him only by a distinctive bump on his ear.
Most of that time was a daze for the family members, who had to wade through media encampments, supporters and protesters to gain entrance to the hospital and attend the funeral. It was only weeks later, after she began to read some of the news accounts and letters she received, that Judy Shepard realized her son was being made a martyr by some. Much was made of his having been lashed spread-eagled to a fence--crucified, as some put it--and hundreds of Web sites were devoted to this “lost innocent,” this perfect college freshman.
It wasn’t the son she knew. She understood immediately that if her son could be deified around the world, he could just as easily be demonized.
“It was really important to tell the truth right away,” she said. “He was not a perfect individual. He had problems. He made mistakes. What I feared was the people would see him as perfect and then those things would come out and then they would say, ‘Forget it, we don’t care now.’ I knew that other young gay kids were struggling. It just seemed important to tell the truth for a lot of reasons.”
What emerged after his death was a portrait of a young man still struggling with life’s bumps. Matthew Shepard was taking drugs for depression and anxiety, he drank too much and, in his defiance of fear, may have been reckless in trusting others.
Although she was prepared for the inevitable backlash about her son’s being gay, she did not anticipate the deluge of hate that would cascade down after the murder. For every Web site memorializing her son, there was another gleefully celebrating his death. His funeral was picketed by a small number of anti-gay protesters, and at least one Web site invites browsers to click and hear his screams from hell.
Judy Shepard has seen the Web sites. “To develop anger in response to them--I just don’t have enough emotions to go around,” she said. “I know what they’ve done to Matt. I just think they are ignorant. I pity them.”
It’s the same “dead feeling” she harbors for Henderson and McKinney. She faced Henderson at his hearing and said, “I know it sounds strange to people, but I truly feel nothing for them--no hate, no anger. It’s a void.”
She will attend every moment of McKinney’s trial and has put her own grief process on hold until afterward. “I just don’t think I could hold it together if I was going through that kind of introspection.”
Using Her Platform
Shepard prefers to spend time with the foundation and to respond to the 10,000 pieces of mail and more than 80,000 e-mail messages she has received--and to use her tiny platform to prevent other hate crimes. She has testified before Congress in support of the federal hate crimes bill, which has passed the Senate and is stalled in the House. The bill would extend federal protections to sexual orientation, gender and disability.
The fledgling activist is ready. Judy Shepard is determined that her voice, tiny but resolute, will be heard.
“I’m not really sure anyone is going to listen to me, but it gives a face to a community of grief and struggle. And it gives a Middle American face for Middle America to see the problem. Whether they actually hear the words I say and agree with them, I don’t know. But I think by putting myself out there and saying, ‘This happened to my son; please don’t let it happen to anyone else,’ will make a difference for a while. I hope it does.”
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4a66b5a3df7c4a2a20539b81c07950bb | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-sep-24-mn-13479-story.html | Microsoft Exec’s Speech Knocks Stocks for a Loop | Microsoft Exec’s Speech Knocks Stocks for a Loop
The president of the world’s leading software company on Thursday called U.S. technology stocks absurdly overpriced, sending an already nervous stock market to one of its biggest declines in months.
The remarks by Microsoft Corp. President Steven Ballmer knocked a key remaining prop out from under a market that has been struggling for weeks with fears about interest rates, the weak dollar, a ballooning U.S. trade deficit and the year 2000 computer problem.
In heavy selling late in the day, the technology-dominated Nasdaq composite index plunged 108.33 points, or 3.8%, to 2,749.83, its biggest one-day percentage loss since April 19.
The blue-chip Dow Jones industrial average fared somewhat better but still sank 205.48 points, or 2%, to 10,318.59, its lowest close since April 9.
The Dow now has tumbled 1,007 points, or 8.9%, since reaching a record high of 11,326.04 on Aug. 25. Many major tech stocks, however, have hit new highs in recent weeks, bucking the broader market’s trend.
That gave Ballmer’s comments Thursday to a journalists conference in Seattle all the more weight, on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley.
Ballmer, who was a Harvard crony of Microsoft founder Bill Gates and who now runs the software giant’s day-to-day operations, told the journalists that “there’s such an overvaluation of tech stocks it’s absurd. And I’d put our company’s stock in that category.”
The frothiness is “a bad thing for the long-term health of the economy,” he said, adding, “Anything that’s false is bad.”
The debate over how high stocks should be valued relative to underlying earnings has intensified in recent years as the bull market has roared to unprecedented heights--led by technology stocks.
In one camp on Wall Street are investors who argue that the U.S. economy’s astounding health merits stock prices far above historical norms. And because tech stocks are the leaders of the “new economy,” they merit sky-high prices relative to earnings, this camp contends.
Microsoft shares, for example, are priced at more than 60 times the $1.42 a share the company earned in the fiscal year ended June 30. That so-called price-to-earnings multiple is double what investors were willing to pay for the stock just a few years ago.
In another camp on Wall Street are many other investors who fear that stocks overall, and tech and Internet stocks in particular, are grossly overpriced. Ballmer, 43, has long been in that camp, often warning that Microsoft’s heady growth must slow. But he was perhaps at his most blunt on Thursday.
“Maybe what we heard was the sound of a bubble bursting,” said Arthur Micheletti, chief investment strategist at Bailard Biehl & Kaiser in San Mateo, Calif. “There’s always some watershed event that triggers it.”
“Maybe we’ve found the one honest man,” added Micheletti.
That tech stocks are overpriced is “obvious on its face,” said Michael Murphy, publisher of the California Technology Stock Letter in Half Moon Bay. “But it’s an emperor’s-new-clothes situation: Everybody knows, but nobody’s supposed to say it.”
Murphy recalled that the late Hewlett-Packard Co. founder David Packard helped snuff out a technology rally in the mid-1960s by expressing similar puzzlement at his company’s soaring stock price.
Yet Murphy said that Ballmer’s timing was “bizarre,” coming as it did on the day Microsoft unveiled plans to float new shares in its Expedia Internet site, which lets people make travel reservations online. The apparent goal of the stock offering: to cash in on the resurgent craze for Net stocks.
The markets’ reaction to Ballmer’s words was nearly instantaneous. The Nasdaq index, which had been edging upward after a weak start Thursday, abruptly reversed course. The plunge steepened and spread to the Dow as trading volume surged.
Microsoft’s own shares plunged $4.88 to $91.19. Among other tech giants, Intel slid $5.31 to $77.50 and IBM fell $3.19 to $122.
At midday today in Asia, markets were also down sharply, suggesting Ballmer’s comments echoed worldwide. Japan’s Nikkei-225 stock index fell 2.9% to 16,823. Hong Kong slid 1.9%.
Until Ballmer weighed in, technology shares had been about the only bright spot in a U.S. market that has seen transportation, banking, appliance, chemical and defense stocks--among others--battered in recent weeks.
In fact, more than 70% of the stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange have lost ground this year. Yet the Nasdaq index, boosted by tech shares, hit a record high of 2,887.06 two weeks ago.
Despite the market’s weakness, some analysts remain bullish.
Thomas M. Galvin, strategist at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in New York, said the current pessimism is unwarranted. While stocks may move “sideways” for the next few months, he expects a strong rally to kick off the new year.
Many analysts expect companies to report strong earnings this quarter, underpinning stocks.
Still, there have been other signs recently of what some analysts call “market fatigue.” Online brokerage trading volume declined in summer from spring’s pace, suggesting that the novelty of point-and-click investing may have worn off. The amount of cash pouring into stock mutual funds has also declined.
Oddly, Wall Street seems to be getting exactly what it once claimed to want: a global economic recovery. But with the rebound come things that stock and bond investors can’t abide, such as higher interest rates, rising commodity prices and competition for money from foreign markets.
Ballmer’s audience was the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. Not sparing anyone’s feelings, he said the media contribute to stocks’ overvaluation by portraying the technology industry in terms of a “gold rush.”
“The story that gets written is, ‘Isn’t it great to live in California in 1849--I mean 1999?’ ” he said.
For Ballmer, free speech didn’t come cheap. With Microsoft stock’s slide Thursday, his personal stake--240 million shares as of last January--lost $1.17 billion in value.
Asked what Microsoft’s stock price should be, he said, “Less.”
* NET MERGER
EarthLink and MindSpring plan a merger that could hasten the roll-out of high-speed services. C1
MARKETS
* YIELDS TUMBLE
Treasury bond rates dive amid “flight to quality.” C4
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eb70eef7fa32fb7714958be66ebb08f7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-sep-28-mn-14873-story.html | Broad Health Care Reform Package Signed Into Law | Broad Health Care Reform Package Signed Into Law
Gov. Gray Davis on Monday signed into law one of the most ambitious health care reform packages in the nation, granting more than 20 million California residents the right to sue their HMOs, obtain second medical opinions and appeal their health plan’s decisions to independent experts.
The package of 20 bills, which Davis touted as a balanced, bipartisan effort, includes not only measures to ensure HMO accountability but also mandates for coverage of mental illness treatment, contraception, cancer screening and a variety of diabetes services and supplies.
And it provides confidentiality protections for consumers, sets up a new Department of Managed Care to oversee health maintenance organizations and establishes a financial solvency board to address the financial condition of medical groups.
“It’s time to make the health of the patient the bottom line,” Davis said in a packed ceremony at the Family Medical Center in North Hollywood in front of a banner reading “Putting Patients First.” “We are today taking historic steps to cure what ails our managed care system.”
Seeking to set a national example, the governor pointedly prodded Congress to pass a similar set of guarantees right away.
“There is no reason why Congress can’t pass a patients’ bill of rights by the end of the session this year,” Davis said, to cheers from hundreds of people gathered outside the center.
California is the latest of several states to push ahead on a comprehensive managed care regulation while Congress--under heavy pressure from insurers and employers--has dallied over whether to enact strong patient protections nationally.
“As the birthplace of managed care and the biggest state in the country, it’s a big deal when California acts because it instantly becomes a bellwether for the nation,” said Larry Leavitt, a senior health policy analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit health care research organization based in Palo Alto.
“That’s particularly true because the fight here was fairly contentious. . . . In many other states there are lobbyists, but the clout of consumers and of insurers and business is not as strong as it is in California.”
With the new laws, California joins fewer than half a dozen states that allow patients to sue their health plans for negligence.
The other large state with a liability law as well as a strong independent appeals law is Texas (where the law is being challenged).
“This sends a message to Congress that it’s not just Texas, it’s other states that believe that holding managed care companies accountable is important,” said Connie Barron, a senior lobbyist for the Texas Medical Assn.
“Washington has been much slower to respond [than the states], but this development should increase the likelihood that federal legislation will pass,” agreed Chris Jennings, chief health care policy advisor to President Clinton.
House Poised to Take Up Bill
On Capitol Hill, the House of Representatives is poised to take up a measure next week that would impose uniform regulations on managed health care plans nationwide. In contrast to the California law, that federal legislation would cover everyone with health insurance, not just HMO members.
Reform advocates cautioned that California’s new laws, which will take effect next year and the year after, protect only those people in plans regulated by the state. About 48 million Americans--including 2 million in California--are in plans governed solely by federal laws. In such plans employers self-insure, meaning that they pay for their workers’ health care directly out of premiums collected rather than relying on an insurer.
Davis’ enthusiastic embrace of the reforms marked a change since midsummer, when he abruptly put the brakes on about 70 bills headed for his desk. A cautious and centrist governor, Davis noted that many conflicted with each other or were duplicative and said he would accept only five or six streamlined bills.
Stunned fellow Democrats complained that Davis’ declaration appeared to be a rerun of a 1997 surprise by Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, who, through threatened or actual vetoes, delayed the overhaul of the managed care industry by almost two years.
Although some consumer advocates complained about weaknesses and items left out of the reform legislation, many legislators and advocates were euphoric, saying the reforms went further than they ever anticipated.
“I am so excited I can hardly stand it,” said Assemblywoman Helen Thomson (D-Davis), who for three years struggled to push a bill though the Legislature that would force plans to cover biologically based mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, on par with other physical diseases.
“Wowee!” said Assembly member Carol Migden (D-San Francisco), coming off the podium after the signing ceremony. “In combination, these bills are going to provide real relief to people [and will] be easy to understand and implement.”
Migden introduced what Davis called one of the “crown jewels” of the legislative package--setting up an independent medical review system for patients to dispute claims when treatment has been delayed, denied or modified by their health plan.
Another item cited by the governor was the right-to-sue legislation introduced by state Sen. Liz Figueroa (D-Fremont), which is limited to consumers who can show they were “substantially harmed” by a plan or company.
The new laws will also compel plans to provide second opinions to patients who request them.
From the multibillion-dollar managed health care industry, Davis’ action drew mixed praise and a warning of potential higher costs to consumers.
Walter Zelman, president of the California Assn. of Health Plans, said the package should “substantially increase consumer confidence that they will get the health care they need when they need it.” But he voiced concern that the program “includes proposals which we fear may produce more in the way of higher costs than benefits to consumers.”
Industry Opposed Bill
The industry strongly opposed the bill allowing privately insured Californians to sue their health plans, but supported the bill to establish an independent review process for resolution of disputes. It also “reluctantly opposed” mental health parity on cost grounds.
Assembly Republican leader Scott Baugh of Huntington Beach joined in warning of potential higher costs to consumers, noting that several of the bills require the addition of new services, tests or medications, including birth control pills for women.
“This package of mandates . . . will bring about a collective increase in premiums to the ratepayer of 10% to 15%,” Baugh warned.
Stephen Mayberg, director of California’s Department of Mental Health, discounted concerns that health care costs will increase markedly as a result of the parity legislation.
“The experience in 27 other states [with so-called parity laws] is that it hasn’t significantly changed the economics of the delivery of services,” Mayberg said.
On a national level, mental health advocates were thrilled at California’s parity law.
“California is the big prize,” said Laurie Flynn, director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. “For such a large populous state, a diverse state, to move parity into law is a big victory for people with mental illness.”
State consumer advocates lauded the reform package but stressed that patients need to be educated about their new rights and that gaps in the new protections must be filled.
“It’s a good set of rights--but consumers have to know they have them, said Peter Lee, of the Center for Health Care Rights. “That continues to be the outstanding question mark . . . whether the new [Department of Managed Care] will really work to inform consumers about their rights and do what the governor says he wants to do, which is put patients first.”
Jamie Court, director of Consumers for Quality Care of Santa Monica, said that the new laws fall short in that HMOs still can prevent patients from suing by forcing them to sign binding arbitration clauses as a condition of treatment.
Missing from the governor’s stack of signed bills were two controversial measures on which aides said he has not yet made a decision. One, AB 58, by Assemblywoman Susan Davis (D-San Diego), would require medical directors of health plans who make medical decisions to be licensed physicians. The other, AB 394, by Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica), would require the state Department of Health to establish minimum nurse-to-patient ratios in most hospitals.
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Marquis reported from Los Angeles, Rubin from Washington and Ingram from Sacramento. Times staff writer Dan Morain in Sacramento contributed to this story.
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25b7b9d07260624573fe5c8ce48fc62f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-sep-30-me-16712-story.html | $112 Million to Be Spent on Aesthetic Upgrade for LAX | $112 Million to Be Spent on Aesthetic Upgrade for LAX
Officials at Los Angeles International Airport have announced plans for a $112-million beautification project that will feature a circle of towering, graffiti-proof pillars and the huge letters “LAX” at the main entry.
Calling it the first aesthetic upgrade since the 1984 Olympics, Mayor Richard J. Riordan and airport officials said the improvements would forever secure the airport’s status as a “sophisticated, world-class landmark.” The work, scheduled for completion in 2001 and funded by parking and concession fees, will include landscaping, improved signage and lighting, and a new public address system.
But even as officials hailed the project as a long-awaited improvement with a potential to create jobs, some airport neighbors said the last thing LAX needs is a face lift.
El Segundo Mayor Mike Gordon, who heads a coalition of cities opposed to airport expansion, said Wednesday that funds would be better spent on reducing traffic congestion around LAX.
“There are a lot more important issues that need to be addressed before they start planting flowers there,” Gordon said.
The project has been dubbed “Gateway LAX” and is scheduled to begin in January. Its most visible feature will stand at the airport’s main entryway, the intersection of Century and Sepulveda boulevards. Sixteen 10-story columns, all white, will be installed in a circular pattern and illuminated with multicolored lights. Three 40-foot-tall letters spelling LAX will stand in front of the columns. Each column will be protected by thick, tempered glass.
Officials say that all work will be done during nighttime and off-peak hours to reduce traffic problems.
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e86dfafd5e289be30378070db9bc40e6 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-sep-30-me-16719-story.html | D.A. Fails to Get Suit on Child Support Dismissed | D.A. Fails to Get Suit on Child Support Dismissed
A Municipal Court judge on Wednesday allowed a taxpayer lawsuit against the Los Angeles County district attorney’s child support unit to proceed.
Judge S. Patricia Spear did not grant the demurrer sought by county attorneys, which would have ended the lawsuit that seeks to compel the office to release child support money it has collected but says it cannot distribute.
The office has held as much as $25 million in an interest-bearing account, sometimes in violation of state law. But county officials say the amount has been reduced to about $10 million and that they are trying to distribute the funds.
The lawsuit, by taxpayer attorney Richard Fine, alleges that the office has no right to hold the money and should return it.
County lawyers were successful in getting an earlier version of the suit dismissed on technical grounds, but Fine amended it to meet the county’s objections and refiled.
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6511eb89c080d2ffa5b9d226c1bd74a3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-04-mn-15701-story.html | Everything That’s Old Is What’s New in Houston | Everything That’s Old Is What’s New in Houston
Until recently, Houston’s interest in architectural landmarks could basically be summed up by the Witch Hat.
A spooky, 20-foot cupola built in the 1900s, the Witch Hat for generations was a local icon. The house it perched on was, as well, a lone remnant of the grand Victorians that lined once-stylish Main Street.
So when the house’s owners planned to raze it in the 1990s, preservationists leaped to combat. For four years, they lobbied and they pleaded, even hatching plans to roll the house to safety on a truck.
But in this city founded on big business and big space, old buildings rated little notice. The Witch Hat house fell in 1997. When the rubble cleared, the activists’ lone victory glared from a local salvage yard. The only thing they had rescued was the hat.
What a difference a few years make. In the span of about 30 months, the nation’s fourth-largest city has plunged into a major downtown revival--and its leitmotif is all things retro.
Entrepreneurs now jostle to convert once-scorned vintage buildings into lofts. Public funds have helped, partly financing an old-style baseball park and a Main Street face-lift, complete with fountains and old-time lampposts. The stadium, which opened last week, embraces the city’s long-disused train station as a entrance. Drawn by all this movement, merchants and residents are moving into addresses passe for 40 years.
For the first time in Space City’s history, the look of what they want is Old.
The idea of yuppies, retirees and vexed commuters moving back to city centers isn’t new. By the 1990s, it was a U.S. trend: downtowns once synonymous with despair, remade and marketed as smart and livable.
In older cities such as New York, respect for historic buildings goes back further. With memories dating to the Revolution, these cities sustained strong, shrewd preservation groups for generations. In fact, a few architecture critics now argue that these groups wield too much power, bullying cities into a kind of physical conservatism.
But in youthful Houston, the lure of age surfaced later than in almost any other place. Typical for Houston, it was developers--not preservationists--who catapulted vintage into vogue. And when they did, they fueled nothing less than a rethinking of the city’s identity.
“Suddenly, the physical environment, the built environment, the public spaces matter here,” says Stephen Klineberg, a Rice University sociologist. “This is wholly new.”
Altogether, more than $1.7 billion has coursed into downtown redevelopment; $250 million more will go into projects in surrounding neighborhoods. By 2002, some 2,500 new residents are expected to live in the city center, many in smartened-up prewar buildings.
Less clear, architecture experts say, is if the taste for gracious spaces reaches past downtown--and if Houstonians truly grasp the breadth of Houston’s heritage.
Astrodome Debut Was Proud Moment for City
Perhaps more than that of any other city, Houston’s self-image has revolved around the future. It was here, in the Clear Lake area that NASA prospered in the early 1960s. Not coincidentally, one of the city’s proudest moments was the opening of the Astrodome in 1965. The first permanently air-conditioned sports dome, the so-called Eighth Wonder of the World, testified to Houston’s love of growth--if necessary, at the cost of grace.
“The whole thing far surpasses all current definitions of kitsch, obscenity and bad taste,” Italian architectural critic Vicky Alliata sniped about the Dome in 1974. But Houstonians adored it for its size, its cosmic optimism, its very groundskeepers who in early years bustled through their tasks in spaceman costumes.
Minutes from the generous East Texas oil fields, Houston for much of its history had little use, otherwise, for self-definition. The jobs that doubled the population every 20 years, sometimes every decade, defined it automatically.
“The essential nature of Houston during the 20th century was riding the oil boom,” says Klineberg. “It was totally impervious to any concept of history. There was a perception in Houston that people came to this city to make money, with very little interest in the long-term past or long-term future.”
Physically and politically, it was a city sculpted not only by rich oilmen but by developers entranced by vast flat sketchboards of space. Decade after decade, voters have rejected zoning, making Houston the only major U.S. city without that planning tool. Inspired by cheap labor and low taxes, lusty developers built hosts of downtown skyscrapers and suburbs crawling boundlessly across the prairie.
The building-happy climate made for famous contrasts. Today, shadows of those skyscrapers brush clapboard houses built by descendants of freed slaves. In the close-in Montrose neighborhood, elephantine new townhouses line whole streets, their carports dwarfing humble bungalows below them.
Free of regulation, a bus repair shop here might share a street with a Mississippi-style plantation house. But the relative anarchy also coddles a distinct expressiveness. More than most cities, in Houston what you build shows what you dream.
So wooden cottages nudge homes made into temples, tiered gardens--or, in the case of the late John Milkovisch, an uninterrupted surface of tinkling beer-can tabs. Elsewhere, in immigrant neighborhoods, elongated shotgun houses--named because a bullet could course unimpeded through all its rooms--nestle amid plantain trees and discreetly roaming chickens.
Little known to most outsiders, the money that drenched Houston also financed some first-rate design. There’s the fanciful Mediterranean-Byzantine campus of Rice University, and the high-rises and signature homes by Mies Van der Rohe and Phillip Johnson. Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano created the Menil Collection, a world-class private museum, tucked in a flock of cottages painted a surrealist-inspired gray.
But spiking oil prices in the late 1970s and early 1980s also sparked a frenzy of demolitions to make space for futuristic skyscrapers. When the economy tanked in 1985, old structures were targeted again. Desperate to wrench money from the inner city, property owners flattened scores of prewar buildings to unroll parking lots in their stead. Now, some 60 vintage buildings remain downtown.
They could do this, preservationists explain, thanks to public policy cut and stitched for developers. Until five years ago, the city had no preservation laws at all. In 1995, the City Council finally adopted one: The weakest in any major U.S. city, it simply requires the owner of a historically important building to wait 90 days before leveling it.
“Houston is full of space, partly because there is a Texan endlessness of space for it to use, partly because so much of it has been knocked down,” observed British writer Alan Hollinghurst after a visit. “The parking lots are themselves part of the pattern of emptiness. They give an odd rhythm to much of downtown, like a half-cleared game of cyclopean solitaire.”
For a long time, developer and preservationist Minnette Boesel was one of a tiny band of business dissidents. Arriving from Baltimore in the early 1980s, she cringed at Houston’s blindness to the inner-city restoration trends across the country.
“In Dallas, it was the West End. In Baltimore, it was the Inner Harbor,” Boesel says. “It’s not rocket science. . . . In other cities, preservation becomes an economic development tool.”
Economics Plays Important Role
So what magic, in a city where preservationists can save nothing but a witch hat, suddenly makes old buildings viable? That’s easy, developers and architects agree.
The bottom line.
“Historic preservation is now recognized by a lot of people as a magnet for business,” says Houston resident Anne Furse, former landmarks chief of New York’s preservation commission. “It’s sort of self-evident that attractive streets and historic buildings draw visitors.”
But if older cities, including Boston, Baltimore and Denver, have for years included preservation in their downtown projects, in Houston it was only in the mid-1990s that then-Houston Mayor Bob Lanier, a millionaire developer, came round to the idea.
“The politics of this city still are defined by developers,” notes Jay Aiyer, an aide to Mayor Lee Brown. “Now the only difference is they’re doing a different kind of development.”
In 1997, Lanier shepherded a complex $32-million package of private and city funds to redo the then-84-year-old Rice Hotel. A glamorous melange of residential lofts, downstairs restaurants and pricey shops updated by developer Randall Davis, the finished Rice promptly filled to capacity.
Now, deserted Houston sparkled with pedestrians. Office folk emerged even in the grueling summer, squinting in straw hats and shirt-sleeves as they nibbled ice cream around outdoor tables at the Rice.
“In the last two years, it’s been a miracle transformation,” says Boesel, who herself renovated a small set of loft apartments before the boom began. “People are wanting to invest downtown, people want to come here. This is the place to be.”
Even Enron Field, the new stadium named for a locally based energy titan, boasts dutifully restored antique features. Though its retractable roof recalls the Astrodome’s Space Age panache, the rest of the stadium looks self-consciously retro. (The Astrodome still houses the yearly Livestock Show and Rodeo.)
Designed by Kansas City’s HOK Sports Facilities, the stadium’s red masonry and looping arches are echoes of the 1900s train station that is the entrance. True, Enron Field’s old-time aspect is just the latest example of a national vogue in stadium fashion.
But only in Houston, where the mighty Astrodome now looks merely quaint, could old-fashioned become downright revolutionary.
Historian Sees Lack of Coherent Movement
Stephen Fox is peering at the tin house through one lens of a spectacle. Tweedy, debonair and quietly eccentric, Fox is Houston’s premier architectural historian, conversant with every building of significance in the city.
Fox sees beauty in the jumbled metropolis--at the same time bristling skeptically about its character. In particular, Fox doesn’t think the downtown loft fever translates into any real grasp of historic buildings’ value beyond commercial use.
The house he’s eyeing through his broken glasses could fall prey to that obliviousness. Dotting Houston’s working-class West End, these so-called tin houses--actually they’re made of Galvalume, an alloy--comprise Houston’s sole home-grown architectural movement.
Meant to blend into working-class neighborhoods where bungalows share blocks with sheds and modest warehouses, the jaunty tin houses mostly belong to local architects and artists.
Now that the houses have raised the West End’s profile, developers have followed, replacing the surrounding cottages with out-sized townhouses. Without restrictions or binding laws to preserve them, the character of old neighborhoods is vanishing as fast as the old downtown buildings are returning to life, Fox complains.
“Preservation in Houston never amounts to a trend,” he adds. “It’s about isolated constituencies that may intersect from time to time, but what it never amounts to is a coherent movement.”
Rice sociologist Klineberg disagrees, arguing that the new attraction of vintage buildings reflects a city forced to redefine itself. “Before, the reason for Houston’s growth was that we were located in the East Texas oil fields. But oil is no longer the center of the American economy. The center of the American economy is knowledge, and there is no reason for anyone to come to Houston anymore unless it has unique qualities that make it a special place. We’re all competing on the basis of quality of life.”
Houstonians are also less transient. In the early 1980s, roughly 20% of Houston’s population had lived here for three years or less. Two decades later, that number has dropped to only 10%, and the number of people here for 20 years or more has risen by 15%.
But Fox and other historians still shake their head at recent demolitions in historic but poor neighborhoods, displacements they argue show how shallow Houston’s grasp of history really is.
The most controversial of these, at the Allen Parkway Village apartments built by the U.S. government in 1942, coincided almost exactly with downtown’s revival. Prized by architectural experts, the airy, garden-dappled complex was torn down and replaced by about half the original 1,000 subsidized units.
The redevelopment, says architecture expert Diane Ghirardo, erased not just an existing community but also an important architectural landmark. “If you’re interested in historic preservation, in retaining not just the odd building but some sense of the city’s historic fabric, then profit motive should not always be the dominant motive,” says Ghirardo, a professor at USC.
‘I Think We’re Catching Up’
Lifelong Houstonian and preservationist Clarence Bagby, though, insists his fellow citizens have always prized their past, they just didn’t know how to protect it. “I think we’re catching up.”
Of course, Houston still lacks any law that permanently protects any building from demolition. But there are other tools neighborhoods can use, he says, such as applying for state taxing zones that give the right to regulate design and land use standards. It’s a compromise, says Bagby, in a city no longer obsessed with the future--but forever in love with possibility.
“It’s the whole freedom thing--the freedom to ‘do with my property what I choose,’ ” Bagby concedes. Still, he points out, residents in his own turn-of-the-century neighborhood bordering downtown are now working together to revive its old aesthetic. They’re restoring sidewalks, putting up a gazebo.
And they’ve bought the Witch Hat to crown it.
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704d57b06dcd90bc398028a4a91befb5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-05-mn-16221-story.html | Annulment Denied in Millionaire Marriage | Annulment Denied in Millionaire Marriage
A judge has refused to grant TV’s instant bride an instant annulment. Instead, a court hearing is set for today to determine if Darva Conger’s marriage to a multimillionaire really was a fraud.
Conger filed for an annulment March 7, saying her quickie marriage to Rick Rockwell was a mistake and that she was never told about the groom’s “history of problems with women.”
Conger, 34, has said that a contest she signed up for on a lark went unbearably wrong when Rockwell, 42, selected her from among 50 contestants on the Fox TV special “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire.”
They married on the spot in Las Vegas during the Feb. 15 show, with more than 22 million viewers watching. Despite the smash ratings, Fox canceled a rebroadcast of the show and swore off a sequel and similar program after it was disclosed that a former fiancee obtained a restraining order against Rockwell in 1991 for allegedly hitting and threatening her.
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dd49d04e3536dd1f5bd7c539e809cf75 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-08-me-17324-story.html | The Rev. S.M. Lockridge; Prominent San Diego Pastor | The Rev. S.M. Lockridge; Prominent San Diego Pastor
The Rev. S.M. Lockridge, 87, a major religious and social force in San Diego for decades. As pastor of Calvary Baptist Church and president of the California Missionary Baptist State Convention, he was known for his evangelical conferences, powerful preaching and civil rights activism. “He had a great sense of humor, but was always very serious when preaching the word of God,” said Councilman George Stevens, a Baptist minister. “He was a giant among preachers.” Lockridge was on the faculty of the Billy Graham School of Evangelism and the Greater Los Angeles Sunday School Convention. His publications included “Rekindling the Holy Fires” and “The Lordship of Christ.” The son of a preacher, he was born Shadrach Meshach Lockridge in Texas and graduated from Bishop College in Marshall, Texas. He began his ministry in Dallas in 1940 and in 1952 accepted the San Diego pastorate. Lockridge became an advisor to politicians such as San Diego Mayors Pete Wilson and Maureen O’Connor, Rep. Jim Bates and state Sens. Waddie Deddeh and Jim Mills. A wake is set for 5-8 p.m. Tuesday and the funeral for 11 a.m. Wednesday, both at Calvary Baptist. Lockridge died Tuesday in San Diego.
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1330fd17c4c4ceb2cc44367b3589bba2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-23-mn-22494-story.html | Passion for Bird’s Nest Soup Is Endangering a Species | Passion for Bird’s Nest Soup Is Endangering a Species
Take globs of bird saliva, a tasteless jelly of little nutritional value, plop it into a broth--and what do you get?
Bird’s nest soup.
For devotees, it’s a divine “caviar of the East,” a delicacy so extravagantly priced that some people kill and die over it. For critics, it’s a dish created through cruelty and endowed with spurious qualities like sexual enhancement by status-seeking Chinese.
The popularity of soup made from the nests of swiftlets continues to soar, depleting bird populations and sparking “birds nest wars” between concession-holders and the poachers and tourist operators who enter their areas.
“They are very nasty people. They’ve been shooting at people for centuries,” says John Gray, an American who ran afoul of the powerful collectors of Phang-nga Bay, where swiftlets make their nests in the caves of spectacular limestone islands.
Calling it “extortion,” Gray’s kayaking venture initially refused to pay a $2.75-a-head fee demanding by the collectors, who claimed the canoeists were disturbing the nests and thus eating into their profits.
Gray, whose Sea Canoe company has won several environmental awards, believes the collectors were behind death threats against him and the near-fatal shooting of his operations manager in 1998. Recently, Gray had to give in or risk being blown out of the waters of Phang-nga Bay.
This area of southern Thailand and similar environments in Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia are home to swiftlets--sparrow-like birds that laboriously fashion cup-shaped nests for their offspring from glutinous saliva.
Attached high on cave ceilings, the nests are gathered by workers who must climb rickety bamboo ladders. Injuries and death from falls are not uncommon.
Overharvesting occurs. Nests are snatched away even before eggs are laid, or baby birds are sometimes thrown away, acts that are heatedly criticized by animal welfare activists.
From the caves of Southeast Asia, millions of nests are sent to Chinese communities around the world, with Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan the top consumers.
Diners at places like Hong Kong’s Fook Lam Moon restaurant are willing to pay dearly for the highest-quality nests--$58 per bowl of soup.
Some eat birds’ nests, which are usually mixed with chicken broth, spices or sweet sauces, to show off wealth and status. But many believe they rejuvenate skin, cure lung disease and increase sex drive.
These claims are dubious at best. Chemical analysis has shown the soup is of low nutritive value. But like tiger penises, rhino horns and other exotic animal parts, the nests are regarded by many Chinese as medicinal and tonic. The demand for such products has devastated endangered wildlife around the globe.
Alex Yau, at the Hong Kong office of the World Wide Fund for Nature, says the territory imported 985 tons of swiftlet nests valued at $700 million between 1992 and 1998.
A sizable percentage of that was transshipped to China, where nests were first eaten some 1,000 years ago and where Yau says consumption is bound to increase with growing affluence.
Experts say greater demand and higher prices have caused overharvesting and thus declines in swiftlet populations, and also encouraged nest farming and even trade in fake nests made from gum extract.
Navjot Sodhi, a biologist at the National University of Singapore, says the number of swiftlets may have declined by as much as 73% in some areas of Southeast Asia between 1962 and 1990 because of nest overharvesting and destruction of forests.
A push by some Western nations to protect swiftlets under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species has failed due mostly to opposition by Southeast Asian countries where so much money is at stake.
Profits are so big that villagers in Indonesia, Thailand and elsewhere have lured swiftlets into abandoned houses. One such nest farm in southern Thailand features tape-recorded sounds of a waterfall to entice the birds.
Villagers also poach on nest concession areas, arguing that locals get no benefit from the business while concession holders and governments that collect tax on the nest harvest grow rich.
Clashes between licensed collectors and locals resulted in the deaths of 14 Thai villagers in the 1990s.
In his futile fight against the nest collectors of Phang-nga Bay, Gray pointed out that they were illegally demanding fees within a national park.
But one Thai sea canoe operator, Thiti Mokapun, said he knew it was fruitless because of the collectors’ powerful political connections.
“We wanted to fight with John too. We did not want to pay,” he said. “But we realized that in Thailand, often there are forces more powerful than the government.”
Among them are the gatherers of bird saliva.
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1c4a4cc41b779427a73aa44276da1339 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-24-he-22804-story.html | With Arbitration’s Pros, Cons, What’s a Patient to Do? | With Arbitration’s Pros, Cons, What’s a Patient to Do?
Suppose you went to a new doctor’s office and were handed a form asking you to agree to arbitration should your treatment lead to a legal dispute. Would you sign? Would you understand what it meant?
This request, made at the same time you fill out insurance forms and medical histories, asks patients to relinquish their right to a jury trial. In the event of a dispute, an outside party hears evidence, renders a decision and sets damages, if any.
In such instances, the decision to limit future malpractice options is made before the doctor has even laid eyes--let alone hands--on the patient.
Charles Inlander, president of the People’s Medical Society, a national consumer advocacy group in Allentown, Pa., calls arbitration agreements coercive “because people don’t realize they have a choice. They don’t know what they’re signing.”
Opponents of the agreements worry that arbitration is weighted against the patient. Doctors’ attorneys are more likely to develop relationships with the arbitrators, they say, who, in turn, may give the plaintiff only a token award to get continued business from doctors.
“We tell patients not to sign them and not to go to any doctor who uses them,” he said. “I think it’s a negative connotation about the way they look at you . . . as a potential suit, not [as] a patient.”
But supporters of the agreements say they help both doctors and patients.
Susan Schmid, a Los Angeles malpractice attorney, has long worked to encourage arbitration. She said that more than 60% of the 5,300 California doctors who get their malpractice insurance through her company, the Cooperative of American Physicians/Mutual Protection Trust, use arbitration.
She added that the forms clearly say patients are giving up the right to a jury trial and that 95% of patients agree to it when the company’s doctors offer it.
The process is efficient, preserves confidentiality (because there is no court reporter), limits the doctor’s time away from the office and reduces legal defense costs because cases are wrapped up quickly, she said.
“What we have found in our practice is that it [saves] about a third the cost of Superior Court trials,” Schmid said. “The big savings is in defense attorney time. It’s three days instead of two weeks.”
Arbitration can cut the defense fees for attorneys and expert witnesses in a malpractice case from $30,000-$50,000 to $20,000-$33,000, she said.
Schmid noted that “interestingly, there are more awards for plaintiffs in the arbitration forum than in the Superior Court,” a statement that neglects to take into consideration that most medical malpractice cases are settled out of court.
Peter Lee, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Health Care Rights in Los Angeles, agrees that arbitration can have advantages for both doctors and patients.
“It can be a faster and less expensive process,” he said. “However, there have been some studies that have found that in arbitration, injured patients are apt to receive lower awards.”
Arbitration of malpractice cases began in the early 1970s, when claims were growing at an unexpected rate and premiums were also rising.
The process commonly involves three arbitrators: one selected by each side and a neutral arbitrator--frequently a retired judge--agreed to by both parties. The decision cannot be appealed by either side.
In both arbitration and court cases, medical malpractice damages for pain and suffering and disfigurement are limited by state law to $250,000.
There is no cap, however, on other types of damages, which include lost income and the cost of future medical care. In such cases, plaintiffs’ lawyers say, juries are more likely to award larger sums of money to defendants in medical malpractice cases than are judges or arbitrators.
The outcomes of both court cases and arbitrated cases are reported to the Medical Board of California, which licenses and disciplines the state’s physicians, said board spokeswoman Candis Cohen in Sacramento.
Nonetheless, although most large health plans, such as Kaiser Permanente, require patients to settle disagreements through arbitration, it’s hard to say how often patients enter such agreements with individual doctors.
According to a 1997 study from the Institute for Civil Justice at Rand, a think tank in Santa Monica, arbitration hasn’t caught on widely. The study found that only 9% of 369 California doctors who responded to a random survey asked patients to agree to arbitrate any dispute.
The study also asked doctors to list the reasons why they used arbitration agreements. The survey found that 57% said they were acting “on the recommendation of their insurer”; 31% said it was the policy of their practice group; and 34% believed arbitration offered a cheaper resolution.
Those doctors who didn’t use arbitration said it was because they weren’t familiar with the process, that it set the wrong tone with patients, or that they were following the policy of their group or insurer.
The California Medical Assn. supports patient choice on whether to arbitrate or meet the doctor in court, saying patients should not be required to sign arbitration agreements as a condition of medical care. Its literature notes that lack of voluntary consent has been used to invalidate some agreements.
Medical Underwriters of California, a malpractice insurer that covers 3,500 California doctors, is lukewarm about arbitration agreements, said Vice President Ron Neupauer.
So far, Neupauer said, he hasn’t seen “any reliable, credible statistics” convincing him that arbitration reduces dispute time and expenses. “I haven’t seen anything that would make an actuary light up.”
Because the malpractice insurance company is doctor-owned, he said, there are concerns about making arbitration the kickoff for a doctor-patient relationship.
“Maybe it falls into the same category as prenuptial agreement,” Neupauer said.
Once a patient signs on the line, he or she has only 30 days for a change of heart. After that, the document commits both sides to binding arbitration for an open-ended period.
Lee at the Center for Health Care Rights says patients shouldn’t agree to arbitration before a problem arises.
“You might want to opt in later, when you know what the implications are,” he said, “rather than when you don’t.”
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aefc437ddfbe8e3764ab73930522dc07 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-25-mn-23275-story.html | Diocese Settles Priest’s Suit for $535,000 | Diocese Settles Priest’s Suit for $535,000
A settlement has been reached in a sex-and-money scandal that rocked the Diocese of Santa Rosa, officials said Monday.
The diocese has agreed to pay $535,000 to Father Jorge Hume Salas, who claimed that Bishop G. Patrick Ziemann demanded sex in return for covering up Salas’ theft from his Ukiah church.
After Salas filed suit last July, Ziemann abruptly resigned, admitting the affair but saying it had been consensual. Diocesan officials subsequently discovered that overspending and large settlements in other sexual-misconduct cases had left the diocese $15 million in debt.
Many churches and schools lost their savings and special funds and have been forced to cut back drastically, postponing projects and conducting emergency fund-raising drives.
As part of the settlement, Salas will resign from the Santa Rosa diocese. However, he will remain a priest. His lawyer said Salas, who is from Costa Rica, does not intend to remain in the United States.
In a joint statement, attorneys for both sides said they disagreed on the merits of the case but “each side recognizes the legal complexities involved, the pain already imposed on the Catholic community by the issues in this case, and the need to bring the matter to a close and move on.”
The diocese last month settled with four former parishioners who alleged that as teenagers they were molested by a former diocese priest.
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e0418d0647284c8bb1f5d8b7693d5d5d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-26-me-23425-story.html | Bowled Over by the New Perfection | Bowled Over by the New Perfection
There was a time when bowling a 300 game was the sporting equivalent of scoring 1600 on the SATs.
It was perfection, an earthly manifestation of the ideal, an opportunity to swagger, to show off your gold ring from the American Bowling Congress, to know that at least one paragraph in your obituary would speak to something besides your standing as a loyal employee and a good family man.
But now, no sooner do I quit bowling for a few decades, than they’ve gone and changed the standards on me. This is what people in government like to call a paradigm shift, even though some of our elected officials tend to pronounce the silent G.
The 300 game still is a big deal.
But it’s not what it was.
For technology--the fickle goddess that drained the taste from our tomatoes, the fat from our beef, and the lead from our gasoline--also has sapped some of the glory from the perfect game. In 1968-69, the American Bowling Congress logged 905 perfect games across the U.S. Last year, the number was 34,470, more than 94 each day.
In Ventura County, there were fewer than one a year from the founding of the local bowling association in 1953 until the early 1980s. Last year, there were 88 at Harley’s Simi Bowl alone, more than anyplace else in Southern California.
It’s as though everyone in coach suddenly jammed into the first-class cabin, swigging champagne and unfolding complimentary copies of the Wall Street Journal. It’s as though sainthood were accessible not only to martyrs, but to people who are just pretty good.
At Simi Valley Bowl, owner Ron Plander had to find a polished wooden board big enough for the Band-Aid-sized brass plaques honoring bowlers who have shot perfect games and other high scores. It now bears some 400 plaques, including four for perfect games shot just last Sept. 29.
“It’s still exciting,” Plander said. “Usually most people stop bowling, and there’s applause and stuff. But it’s not as much as it was 10 years ago.”
So just what is going on in our bowling centers? (I’d call them “bowling alleys,” but the industry hates to see that outdated term in print.)
At Buena Lanes in Ventura, Dan Mueller laments the passing of an era. A generation ago, balls were made of hard rubber. Now they’re made of something called “proactive resin"--the latest in a series of high-tech materials promising bowlers more spin, more revolutions, more power, a killer hook, a more effective “coefficient of friction” and more strikes.
Pins are easier to knock down now and lane surfaces are smoother, Mueller said. And the American Bowling Congress allows proprietors to oil lanes in patterns that can guide a well-thrown, well-placed ball to Strike City.
“I’m bowling better now than I was 10 years ago, when I was a better bowler,” Mueller said. “It’s excellent for recreational bowling, but it’s not good for the sport.”
Hence . . . A Zen riddle: When is perfection less than perfect?
The answer will come only with proper attitude, a pair of rented shoes and a cold beer.
The American Bowling Congress is talking about developing tougher standards for serious bowlers. Many lanes could still be gussied up with strike-inducing oil patterns, but others would be for bowlers seeking a challenge beyond mere perfection.
In the meantime, John Richardson, a Santa Paula rancher who heads the Ventura County Bowling Assn., summed up the situation perfectly: “You still have to knock the pins down,” he said.
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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.
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ff624559905c7b46266ee9d401e82626 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-29-ca-24565-story.html | A Classic Portrait of Garland at Her Emotional Height | A Classic Portrait of Garland at Her Emotional Height
It was 39 years ago this month that Judy Garland stepped on stage at Carnegie Hall and gave what was one of the most celebrated concerts of the modern pop era.
Garland wasn’t the greatest singer or actress of her time, but she was one of the greatest entertainers. Only Frank Sinatra, perhaps, did a better job of acting out a song’s lyrics, making the words seem the singer’s own story.
Sinatra may have been bruised a lot by some very public heartaches (the failed marriage to Ava Gardner) and career humiliations (the fall from grace after the bobby-sox days), but his wounds were far less severe than those inflicted on Garland, whose role as young Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” made her the nation’s sweetheart, and whose subsequent career in movies and recordings made her a popular icon.
Biographies of Garland detail how she was apparently victimized by everyone from a dominating stage mother to tough-minded studio executives, and how her personal life was pushed to the edge by drugs and troubled relationships.
As told in Scott Schechter’s liner notes to a new edition of the album recorded at the Carnegie Hall concert, Garland was so worn down from overwork in the late ‘50s that she checked into a New York hospital, where she learned that she was suffering from hepatitis. She was told that she would spend the rest of her life as a semi-invalid. Future films and concerts were out of the question.
After a few months off, however, Garland was back on the concert stage. She toured Europe and then the U.S., concluding April 23, 1961, at Carnegie Hall.
On that night, she was greeted by a star-studded audience that included Spencer Tracy, who defined the protectiveness that Garland’s fans felt for her. “A Garland audience doesn’t just listen,” Tracy once said. “They feel they have to put their arms around her when she works.”
You can sense that devotion in the intensity of the applause at several places in the album, a two-disc package released by DCC Compact Classics in the label’s trademark 24 Karat Gold CD format.
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**** Judy Garland’s “Judy at Carnegie Hall” (DCC Compact Classics). The interesting contrast between Sinatra and Garland is that Sinatra worked hard to hide his vulnerability, while Garland freely shared hers.
Because of the melancholy undercurrents of Garland’s life, the emotional highs in this album are all the more stirring--from the resilience of “That’s Entertainment” to the untarnished hope of “Over the Rainbow.”
Similarly, you feel the optimism of “You Go to My Head” even though you know that “The Man That Got Away” and “Stormy Weather” are just around the corner.
“Judy at Carnegie Hall” was released by Capitol Records in summer 1961 and it stayed on the pop charts for nearly two years. It spent 13 weeks at No. 1 (taking over from Elvis Presley’s “Something for Everybody”); it won a Grammy for album of the year.
Garland enjoyed considerable success after the Carnegie Hall album. She starred in her own TV series and enjoyed many more concert triumphs, including a pair of appearances in London with her daughter, Liza Minnelli. But Garland, who died in 1969 at age 47, never matched again on record the emotional heights of the Carnegie Hall show.
**** Emmylou Harris’ “Last Date” (Eminent). This live album is in no way as celebrated as Garland’s. It only reached No. 65 on the pop charts and just No. 9 on the country charts when released in 1982. Indeed, Warner Bros. Records apparently thought so little of its commercial potential that the collection was never even released on CD until now.
But the album is a marvel. Harris is my choice as the greatest female country singer ever, and she’s in top form here. Backed by the Hot Band, she set out in a series of California club dates to capture the spirit of genuine country honky-tonk music on record--and she does it.
Harris didn’t write many songs during the early years of her career, but she had almost flawless instincts for material.
Here, she moves from the robust spirit of Hank Snow’s “I’m Movin’ On” to the starkness of Bruce Springsteen’s “Racing in the Streets” to the comfort of Neil Young’s “Long May You Run.” In between, she showcases a few honky-tonk heartbreak tunes, including Don Everly’s “So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad”) and the old Merle Haggard hit “It’s Not Love (But It’s Not Bad),” which was written by Glenn Martin and Hank Cochran. There are also four songs written by or recorded by Gram Parsons, who was Harris’ chief musical mentor.
This edition of “Last Date” is enhanced by a 16-page booklet, complete with liner notes and lyrics, as well as two bonus tracks.
The daring thing about the album (and perhaps the mistake in commercial terms) is that Harris didn’t include any of her own hits. According to the liner notes, however, Harris and the Hot Band did record a set’s worth of her hits during the series of dates. If those tapes still exist, they would be a wonderful volume two.
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*** Emmylou Harris’ “Cimarron” (Eminent). This isn’t another live album, but it is available now for the first time in CD, and it also includes a booklet and a bonus track.
Originally released a few months before “Last Date,” this album didn’t do much better than the live album on either the country or pop charts, and it doesn’t rank among Harris’ essential works.
There are some highlights, including “Born to Run” (not the Springsteen anthem but a song by Paul Kennerley) and “The Price You Pay” (a Springsteen song from “The River”). But much of the album seems formless.
According to Brian Mansfield’s liner notes, Harris’ four albums before “Cimarron” were built around specific concepts, and most of these songs were left over from those projects.
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** 1/2 The Byrds’ “Live at the Fillmore/February 1969" (Columbia/Legacy). This live recording is also available for the first time--and not just on CD, but in any commercial form. Recorded a week after the release of “Dr. Byrds and Mr. Hyde,” the album features a lineup of Roger McGuinn on vocals and guitar, Clarence White on lead guitar, John York on bass and Gene Parsons on drums. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include Gram Parsons (no relation to Gene) and Chris Hillman, both of whom left the Byrds after helping shape the country sensibilities of their “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” album in 1968.
Although the music is framed by White’s stylish guitar work, you sense something missing in many of the tracks--and all you need to confirm the suspicion is to hear the more confident and daring country music offered by Parsons and Hillman in the early works of the Flying Burrito Brothers, the band they formed after leaving the Byrds.
Where McGuinn’s voice approaches country from the folk tradition, Parsons reached into the heart of the sentimental honky-tonk style and added a touch of rock bite to it. The result was captivating, where this is merely well-intended.
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*** The Allman Brothers Band’s “The Best of the Allman Brothers Band/The Millennium Collection” (Polydor). Speaking of live American rock bands, the Allmans on a good night ranked with the best ever. With Duane Allman and Dickey Betts on guitars, Jaimoe and Butch Trucks on drums, Berry Oakley on bass, and Gregg Allman on vocals and organ, they were hypnotic. They even made long instrumental jams exciting.
Unfortunately, these tracks aren’t live. The Allmans could create magic in the studio, but their real forte was in front of an audience. To experience the band at its most powerful, try “The Allman Brothers Band/The Fillmore Concerts,” a two-disc set taken from five 1971 performances. It includes two songs from this package (“Whipping Post” and “Hot ‘Lana”) as well as a version of “One Way Out” that is one of the great moments ever in blues-rock.
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Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).
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2a546e531fa2aeefd9a946250c0f0034 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-29-mn-24659-story.html | Last Man Down | Last Man Down
We all think we know most of the Vietnam War stories. Marriages shattered, families torn apart, years lost to self-doubt for soldiers who fought hard then came home to a nation of critics.
This is one that drifted through my childhood. The last official U.S. casualty in Vietnam was from my hometown, the father of a junior high classmate. He died just 11 hours before the cease-fire took effect.
It stuck hazily in my memory over the years, seemingly one last senseless death in a senseless war, a death that might have been one of the most senseless of all coming so close to the cease-fire. My friends remembered different details, about the family, about how the war had affected our town, but none remembered clearly. So more than 25 years later, I went back to fill in the blanks.
The Jan. 24, 1973, banner on the Mount Pleasant Daily Times-News, dug up on microfilm at the library, read like many headlines around America. Amid the news about who would be speaking at the Livestock Banquet and the man named Outstanding Citizen of the Year was the word the town had been anticipating for days: “PEACE! Vietnam Cease-Fire Saturday.”
But five days later, the Daily Times-News led with these somber words: “Mount Pleasant’s Col. William Nolde Last to Die in Vietnam.” North Vietnamese troops near the village of An Loc had got in a last round of shelling before U.S. combat involvement officially ended, more than two years before the fall of Saigon brought peace.
William Benedict Nolde, 43, a fast-rising Army lieutenant colonel on his second Vietnam tour as an advisor in Binh Long Province, was the lone American victim. An editorial in the paper summed up the feeling in town: “For Us, a Tragic Ending.”
Funeral Draws National Attention
The media rushed in to our town of 20,000 in the heart of Michigan’s mitten-shaped Lower Peninsula, home to Central Michigan University and a then-impoverished Saginaw Chippewa Indian reservation. “Never has such a story attracted as much national attention to Michigan and Mount Pleasant in particular,” the Daily Times-News noted. Nearly 600 people gathered at the local Catholic church, Sacred Heart, for the funeral.
After the service, Nolde’s widow, Joyce, and their five children, ages 12 to 19, flew to Washington on a plane sent by President Nixon for the burial at Arlington National Cemetery and his posthumous promotion to full colonel. Later there was a meeting at the White House.
Col. Nolde was an unusual last official victim. The majority of American deaths in Vietnam were among the grunts, but he was a career officer who returned to Southeast Asia with hopes of getting his first general’s star, says friend Clarence Tuma, whose restaurant, The Embers, is famous around the state for its “one-pound pork chop.”
As I started asking about Bill Nolde, his friends, some of whom I discovered at a Mount Pleasant Rotary Club meeting, remembered the man. He was eloquent, thoughtful, compassionate and always smiling, they said--"personifying the Bible verse, ‘This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it,’ ” as Ted Kjolhede, Central Michigan University’s former basketball coach, put it.
Active in the Lions Club service organization in Mount Pleasant and in Scouting, Nolde visited orphans and refugees in An Loc, the South Vietnamese village where he died, and worked with a local priest on rebuilding efforts.
In his last letter home to a friend, Nolde wrote: “We tend to think only in terms of what war has cost us, but by comparison, to what it has cost so many people, our price pales.”
The Army couldn’t have asked for a better poster boy at a time of defeat.
‘I Lost It, I Totally Lost It’
The day her husband died, Joyce Nolde knew. She was awakened by an explosion in her dream and an apparition of Bill standing in the doorway, telling her he was all right. When Kimberle, then 16, saw the official green car pull up in front of her boyfriend’s house in upstate Millersburg, she thought it meant her father was coming home. When she realized the truth, Kimberle began screaming and took off on a dead run through town. “I couldn’t believe it,” she says now. “I lost it, I totally lost it.”
All the kids were in different places that weekend. Blair, the oldest and a student at Central Michigan, was working at The Embers; Brent, 17, was off wrestling; Bart, the youngest, was on a church outing. Byron, the 13-year-old who was a student at my school, was skiing with family friends. He cried hard when he heard the news but stopped just before being reunited with his mother, remembering his father’s words that he was the family member who had to take care of things, what with his older siblings preoccupied with dating and friends.
Today, married and with two daughters of his own, Byron lives just down the road from his mother and sister. “To this day, I still go out and cry in the woods,” he says. “You question why. I will ask God when I see him: Why? It still doesn’t make sense. That’s part of life; it doesn’t make sense.”
Soon, everyone in town knew what had happened. CBS News and the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times stormed into Mount Pleasant. This was before 24-hour cable and television newsmagazines and the Internet. Asked to leave the family alone, the media respected the request until Joyce was composed enough to make a statement, written by Blair. “They were very respectful,” she says now. “You can’t say enough good things about the media.”
Neighbor Ken Schaeffer, whose children were friends with the Nolde kids, recalls it was “a pretty good blow for the community.”
Bob Howard, now a state corrections officer living in Mount Pleasant and a force behind the town’s Vietnam memorial, was a student of Nolde’s at Central Michigan in the early 1960s. “Somebody has to be last, obviously, but at Central, in the ‘60s, no one knew where Vietnam was, and Col. Nolde was telling them,” Howard says. “And then in 1973, everyone knew what Vietnam was, and they were getting out one way or the other, having seen how useless it all was, and then to die the last . . . .”
Nolde’s story went around the world. Joyce Nolde received thousands of letters, including one from Germany, which insisted her husband was the reincarnation of a Prussian general. Then the story faded. Joyce tried to have the letters published but was told there would be no interest.
Except for son Brent, who stayed to finish high school, the Nolde family left town that May. Their abrupt departure wounded some friends. But it was, Bart presumes, Joyce’s way of dealing with the loss.
She took the family to rural Black Lake, near her tiny hometown of Onaway in the tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, hoping to remove the kids from what to her were the influences of city life.
Family Faces Many Challenges
Joyce, now 69, lives with her white Maltese, Ange, in Onaway in an antique-cluttered 100-year-old house. The ensuing years have thrown many challenges at the family. Bart was tossed from a horse and spent nearly a year recovering from the fractures, with Byron carrying him into and out of the lake every day for physical therapy.
Kimberle, the only daughter, was in a head-on car collision in 1983, which left her comatose, with a brain stem injury and a prognosis that she would be a “vegetable,” her mother says.
Refusing to accept that fate, Joyce hung a sign in the hospital room that said: “There will be nothing spoken negative around Kim.” Kimberle, now 43, recovered enough to live on her own and drive again, although her good and bad days make it impossible for her to work. She and her black Lhasa Apso, Shadow, now live with Joyce.
In the house, Joyce displays a single photo of her husband, in uniform, with a collage backdrop of his name on the Vietnam War Memorial. The clock stopped when he was killed, but they had it restarted. “I’m one of those people who doesn’t dwell in the past,” Joyce says. But she feels her husband is often with them and has often made his presence felt over the years.
She never wanted to remarry, despite her children’s insistence that she date. “I had the best,” she says. They met when both were teaching in a two-room schoolhouse in Newberry, in Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula. Joyce taught fifth and sixth grades, Bill seventh and eighth. When they first met, “you said he was a hick,” daughter Kimberle interrupts.
“He was not polished enough to suit me,” Joyce concedes.
They came from different worlds: He grew up poor on a small farm near Menominee, a lumber town in the Upper Peninsula. She was from Onaway, which calls itself the “Sturgeon Capital of Michigan,” and her parents were teachers. He was Catholic; she was Methodist. But “once we committed, we committed,” she says.
Blair was 10 days old when Bill left for Korea, an Army draftee tapped for officer training. Soon they were living a career Army life: a tour in Germany, a stint teaching military science in CMU’s mandatory Reserve Officers Training Corps program, a first tour in Vietnam in 1964-65, a posting to Italy without the family.
Bill arrived home from Italy in June 1972, the day before Blair’s high school graduation. The call from Army Chief of Staff Gen. William C. Westmoreland came the next morning, Joyce says, asking if Bill would agree to one more tour “to clean things up.”
None of the kids were happy that their dad went back; some were unhappier than others. But duty called, and Nolde had ambitions. He planned to run for president some day, Joyce says.
“There’s little doubt in my mind that had he survived and stayed in the military he would have become a very high-ranking officer,” says John Kulhavi, a former student who is now a brigadier general in the Army Reserves. “He had what it takes.”
Ten days later, Nolde was on the plane. The last thing he said to his wife at the airport: “We don’t have a lot of money, but we sure have a lot of love,” Joyce recalls.
His mother “had every reason to be bitter,” says Bart. “People weren’t supporting the war at the time. She lost her husband at the pinnacle of his career.” Her lifestyle now, he notes, is hardly “how she could have lived as a general’s wife, because that’s where he seemed to be headed.”
Yet Joyce said she wasn’t bitter then and isn’t now. Not that it wasn’t hard to be left with a lot of responsibility. She did not feel totally happy about the way the war was conducted, that the government gave in to demonstrators and that some loyal Vietnamese were left behind in the evacuation of Saigon. She is unhappy about military benefits; for one thing, she says she would lose hers if she remarried, even though “my husband gave his life for this country.”
But, she says: “He was there for the right reason. Everybody wants me to be bitter. That’s foolishness. He died doing something he wanted, and that’s something most people never do. He wasn’t there to fight a war; he was in the Army to spread good.”
Children React Differently
All the Nolde kids except Bart, who lives in Tampa, Fla., are now scattered around Michigan. Not all of the Nolde children wanted to talk about their memories and feelings; their father’s death was particularly hard for the oldest--Blair, now 47, and Brent, 44--Joyce says, although each of Nolde’s children reacted deeply in his or her own way.
Byron, now 41, and Kimberle, who have an easy affection with each other, sit in the living room of their mom’s house and reminisce about how, on the times their father was home, he would play sports with all the neighborhood kids and parents. He was so popular, their friends “would all say, ‘We want your dad,’ ” says Byron.
The closeness of the family helped everyone pull through. Byron, now a power company executive and a high school sports coach, says the difficulty of the time made him appreciate day-to-day life. “Enjoy it while you’re here. You’re going to have the bad things that happen, but if you live for those, you’re in trouble.”
Bart, who at 39 looks like pictures of his father, has built his life around his father’s last words to him as a 12-year-old at the airport--words that, “had [my father] come back, it would probably have been in one ear and out the other.”
Instead, he took the advice to heart. His father’s words, as Bart recalls them: “Find something in life you love to do and pursue it with a passion . . . , maintain your good name and integrity . . . and the last thing, remember how precious each and every 24 hours of life is--and develop a thirst for life.”
Like his older brother Brent--now retired from the Marines and newly married to his Mount Pleasant high school sweetheart--Bart followed his dad into the military, first signing up for ROTC classes. He served eight years in the Army, including stints on the East German border and in Washington. Still a Reserve major, he is president and co-founder of Rebound Sports, a Tampa-based company trying to build a national brand for sports camps and clinics for kids.
Like his mother, Bart says he has always believed his father’s purpose in life was to serve as a symbol of healing for the country in the aftermath of the divisive war. “He was a good person to do that,” he says.
Nolde Name Not Singled Out in Town
Mount Pleasant took pains to claim Nolde as its own when he died, but today there is no Nolde name gracing the important buildings of the town. His name is on the Michigan Vietnam Memorial on the banks of the Chippewa River, in Island Park, but it’s just one of 2,717 in the list of the state’s war dead and missing.
Since his death, other places have claimed a piece of Bill Nolde’s legacy. The Web site of Menominee, his birthplace, lists him among the 11 natives who lost their lives to the Vietnam War. His name adorns a plaque outside the Onaway Courthouse Historical Museum, along with those of three other Vietnam casualties. A barracks at the U.S. Army post in Vicenza, Italy, home to the missile unit Nolde once commanded, bears his name, and the Sperry Trophy, an honor twice won by Nolde’s unit, was retired in his name at Ft. Sill, Okla. Nolde’s uniform, his medals and the flag from his coffin are on display in the town of Frankenmuth, in the Michigan’s Own Military and Space Museum.
And of course, his name is inscribed on the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. There it becomes clear that in reality, while Nolde may be the last official casualty, he doesn’t anymore have the distinction of being the last American who died in Vietnam; in the 27 months between the cease-fire and the official April 30, 1975, end to the war, about 100 Americans were classified as war casualties, their names following Nolde’s on the stark black wall.
Although a core community of civic leaders remains in place, Mount Pleasant is no longer the small town it was when Nolde died. Casino gambling has transformed the Indian reservation into a mecca for 30,000 visitors a day, with more than $257 million in revenues per year. The fortunes of the Soaring Eagle Casino & Resort have brought changes: a new ice sports complex for the town; hotels that are springing up as fast as they can be built; subdivisions with $250,000 homes replacing the cornfields on the rural River Road where the Noldes used to live.
Recently, a new generation in Mount Pleasant has rediscovered Bill Nolde. In 1997, the ROTC unit at Central Michigan--which had given out a modest annual scholarship in Nolde’s name, established with the donations that townspeople gave at his death--decided to create a hall of fame. Lt. Col. Rodolfo R. Diaz-Pons, who oversaw the unit at the time, also decided to start a lecture series on the interdisciplinary nature of military leadership, naming the series for Nolde.
“It seemed to fit his intellectual standing as a public speaker,” says Diaz-Pons, pastor of the Riverbend Baptist Church in St. Louis, Mich. “He was not only someone worthy of being remembered, but his life and reputation embodied something we wanted to achieve.”
Diaz-Pons says he feels a special bond with Nolde and his family. The Vietnam cease-fire, he says, “came into place on my birthday,” when he was a senior in high school on his way to a military academy. “When reading of Col. Nolde’s death, I noted that when I got up that morning on my birthday, I had no appreciation and knowledge of what was going on thousands of miles away, so that I would be entering the military in peace and be able to complete my military service in peace.”
‘So Many Things Get Exaggerated’
Twenty-five years after the end of the war, with more of the pieces in place, we all relate differently to Vietnam, and sometimes our memory fails. Several people told me about a protest by Central Michigan students who burned down a building, but it never happened, insists town historian John Cumming, adding: “So many things get exaggerated.”
Meanwhile, Nolde’s death, which seemed a big deal at the time to me and my junior high friends, turns out to have had fewer institutional consequences than we all expected.
Many residents don’t even know of their town’s dubious honor. Nolde’s best friend, Michael Chirio, who taught military science with Nolde at CMU and now lives in Detroit, says, his voice breaking, “It all seems for naught. I’ve got a lot of friends whose names are on that wall.” Still, he says, his friend “will always be remembered as the last official casualty; in that respect he’ll always have his place.”
Indeed, for every person in town who doesn’t know the story, I discovered one who did. I found a web of personal ties between families that I didn’t know was there, and veterans of Vietnam and other wars with their own emotional tales to tell, stories that bubbled out as they recalled Bill Nolde. Like many Vietnam stories, Nolde’s has a deep resonance for those who knew him, whose lives he touched.
Terence Moore, president of nonprofit health-care provider Mid-Michigan Health System, was a student of Nolde’s at CMU. “There were a number of us deciding whether to be officers, and he was a role model. I thought that I would like to be like that guy, and if it takes being an Army officer, then that’s what I’ll do.”
John Kulhavi, senior vice president at a brokerage firm, recalls his military science professor as having “all of the traits most men would want: charm, wit, compassion, leadership, understanding, knowledge, and he was a very easygoing person. Even if you did anything wrong, he would correct you with a smile on his face.”
He says he thought about the meaning of Nolde’s death “for a long time.” His conclusion: “It was meant to be; it was what it was. I don’t think there is an explanation for it.”
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Lessons and Legacies: 25 Years After Vietnam
The longest war America has ever fought--and the first one it lost--Vietnam continues to provoke questions and evoke emotions both vivid and complex. The U.S. was involved in Indochina from the late 1950s until the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Throughout this month, The Times is examining the impact of that turbulent time on American society and popular culture and on institutions from the military to the media.
Also see https://www.latimes.com
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4781ff7e9cb03ac0dd677e1fe8b2c69b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-29-mn-24663-story.html | U.S. Attorney Widens Role in LAPD Probe | U.S. Attorney Widens Role in LAPD Probe
Increasing the federal government’s assertive role in the Los Angeles police corruption probe, U.S. Atty. Alejandro Mayorkas said Friday that his office has asked immigration officials to refrain from deporting a Guatemalan national who says he and his girlfriend were beaten, robbed and terrorized by LAPD officers.
Mayorkas said, moreover, that he has ordered a review of all federal prosecutions involving Los Angeles officers who have been implicated in police crimes or misconduct.
In one potentially tainted case, a federal public defender filed court papers last week seeking to overturn a 1997 weapons conviction involving two LAPD officers, one of whom has since been criminally charged in connection with the LAPD investigation.
Mayorkas, who actually ordered the internal review of federal prosecutions two weeks ago, said he believes there are “only a handful” of potentially tainted cases involved.
“We’re not waiting for anyone to contact us. We’re addressing the issue proactively,” he said of federal prosecutions that may have relied on corrupt officers.
That stance applies to potential civil rights violations under investigation by his office, as well, Mayorkas said, noting that prosecutors contacted the Immigration and Naturalization Service to prevent the pending deportation of an alleged victim of former LAPD Officer Rafael Perez, the central figure in the Rampart Division scandal, and his then-partner.
In an April 17 letter to Rosemary Melville, the INS deputy district director in Los Angeles, Chief Assistant U.S. Atty. Consuelo Woodhead said Jorge Toscano is a potential witness to federal civil rights abuses allegedly committed by LAPD officers.
“I wish to express to you our belief that at this time any decision to remove Mr. Toscano from the United States should be deferred,” Woodhead wrote. “This office has undertaken a criminal investigation into allegations of civil rights violations. We are requesting of you sufficient time within which to learn of and assess Mr. Toscano’s allegations.”
A March 28 letter to Mayorkas from Toscano’s attorney, Stephen Yagman, alleges that Toscano was beaten and robbed April 1, 1997, by Perez--who is in jail for his role in the scandal--and his then-partner, Nino Durden.
Toscano’s girlfriend, Cynthia Diaz, filed her own lawsuit over the incident in January.
Yagman demanded that authorities halt the deportation so he can pursue a civil rights lawsuit against the LAPD.
“It remains to be seen if you will do the right thing, to wit, permit Mr. Toscano to remain in the United States as a victim of police brutality and as a material witness to police brutality,” Yagman said in the March 28 letter. “Will you walk the walk?”
Toscano, incarcerated on unrelated charges, is scheduled to be released Thursday from Calipatria State Prison in the Imperial Valley and transferred to the custody of the INS for deportation to Guatemala, Yagman said.
Diaz contends that Perez and Durden, while on duty and in uniform, threatened to kill her if she told authorities about the alleged incident at the Lafayette Hotel on Beverly Boulevard. She said the officers stole $2,700 belonging to Toscano.
Yagman’s letter said Diaz and Toscano were beaten and “terrorized” by the two officers.
Perez has since admitted that he and Durden stole the couple’s money, according to transcripts of his interviews with investigators, a copy of which has been obtained by The Times.
Yagman said he has heard nothing from INS officers, who had no immediate comment.
The lawyer said Mayorkas has “acted like a mensch” and “is walking the walk in the civil rights area.”
“None of his predecessors ever came close,” Yagman said. “This is a terrific development--no matter what happens next.”
The U.S. attorney’s internal review of potentially tainted federal cases coincides with a petition filed by federal Deputy Public Defender Michael J. Proctor, who is seeking a new trial for a man serving a 70-month sentence at the Leavenworth penitentiary in Kansas.
Jorge Sisco-Aguilar, 28, contends that he was framed by former Rampart anti-gang Officers Paul Harper and Mark Wilbur on a federal charge of being an illegal alien in possession of a gun.
Harper was one of three officers arrested Monday, the first to be charged in connection with the LAPD’s corruption investigation.
Harper is accused of perjury in another alleged frame-up involving a planted gun. Wilbur has not been charged, but is among several dozen officers who allegedly witnessed police crimes or misconduct but failed to report them.
Sisco-Aguilar’s request for a new trial will be heard May 15 by Chief U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr.
Mayorkas said his office is still considering whether it will support or oppose the motion. Even as the public defender was preparing the writ, Mayorkas said prosecutors provided information suggesting that the case should be reviewed.
“When we called over there, we found out they were already working on it,” he said.
Federal Public Defender Maria E. Stratton confirmed the phone call. While lauding Mayorkas’ action, she said she hopes he decides to expand on that gesture by directing his staff to collaborate directly with the public defender’s office in identifying suspect cases.
Stratton said her office does not have access to the same law enforcement records available to Mayorkas’ staff.
The federal public defender’s staff has just started its own review, Stratton said, focusing on about 1,000 cases dating back to 1993 and involving defendants convicted of illegal reentry into the United States and related crimes.
Many of those cases involve clients who lived in the predominantly Latino area policed by Rampart officers.
Stratton said her staff has already identified three cases similar to Sisco-Aguilar’s.
Sisco-Aguilar was convicted in June 1997 after a two-day federal trial in which Harper and Wilbur testified that they saw him reach into his waistband and toss away a handgun during a chase through the hallways of a residential hotel.
In his motion for a new trial, Proctor said that the officers changed many key details about the chase but that federal prosecutors dismissed those discrepancies as insignificant.
“That should have been a red flag,” said Proctor, who argued to the jury that the officers lied about the gun.
According to a transcript, Assistant U.S. Atty. Jeff Friedman responded by telling jurors: “What Mr. Proctor has just spent 25 minutes doing is accusing two LAPD officers of being renegade, dirty, gun-planting, drug-planting perjurious individuals.”
The jury convicted Sisco-Aguilar after deliberating 45 minutes.
*
Times staff writers Matt Lait and Scott Glover contributed to this story.
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0cb262803a649c870118d3141f014771 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-30-me-25109-story.html | Hanegraaff Wasn’t ‘Handpicked’ | Hanegraaff Wasn’t ‘Handpicked’
* After reading your article “Casting Stones” (April 15), I am writing to clarify several issues.
First, my husband, Walter Martin, never “handpicked” anyone to succeed him at Christian Research Institute and “The Bible Answer Man” radio program.
This claim was handed to me by someone I thought I could trust as I approached the lectern at my husband’s memorial service.
I read it for the first time--aloud--while standing in front of 1,500 people. It took me completely by surprise and put me in a very awkward position. I wish to take this opportunity now to apologize for allowing this statement to stand for so many years.
At the time of my husband’s death, I believed Hank Hanegraaff was a man God could mold into a strong Christian leader, one who could play a positive role in leading CRI. I supported him loyally for six years before I came to see he was not the man I believed him to be.
Secondly, one of our family’s main objections to Hanegraaff’s continued leadership is his mistreatment of fellow Christians. He has left a trail of wounded people behind him since the takeover of CRI in 1989. The testimonies against him include those who are his “right-hand” people, people who worked closely with him.
Hanegraaff has called repeatedly for accountability in other Christian leaders and should be held accountable himself.
DARLENE MARTIN
San Juan Capistrano
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2426b64c2a678cf59a216ce0a5bde975 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-30-me-25140-story.html | . . . and the Lesson in Every Chore | . . . and the Lesson in Every Chore
California Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin is promoting a marvelous idea: A garden in every school. As coordinator of the Naturalist Academy at North Hollywood High School, I have had the opportunity to see the educational effects of ecological horticulture, a.k.a. organic gardening, on our students. If, in fact, we cannot build schools for the children of Los Angeles, let’s tear up the concrete and the asphalt and grow gardens!
The garden is a great place to teach kids about the birds and the bees. A pair of blue jays hangs out by our compost heap. After waiting in the wings for my students to pitch the pile, the birds swoop in to devour freshly exposed morsels, worms or miscellaneous larvae writhing in the moist rot. There are bees whirring among our broccoli flowers these spring days. In addition to consuming quantities of this healthy vegetable, we let some of the plants go to seed so that we can grow more next year.
Perhaps the latter example provides more opportunities for the students to realize the true intent of that beautiful metaphor--the rituals of reproduction, but in both cases there is far more to learn. As the poet Walt Whitman sings in “This Compost,” “What chemistry!”
In fact, gardening is the ultimate interdisciplinary catalyst. From science and math to history and literature, all are manifested in the art of gardening. From the sowing of the seed to the harvest of the seed, the lessons are abundant. Whether analyzing nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium or synthesizing respect, responsibility and delayed gratification, the learning happens in the head and in the hands. Doing is understanding.
Further, our historical antecedents in the realm of horticulture are many and important. Consider the legacy of learning from Gregor Mendel’s pea patch to Henry David Thoreau’s bean field, or from Thomas Jefferson’s plantation to George Washington Carver’s laboratory. In fact, the aptly named Howard Gardner of Harvard University, in his revised theory of multiple intelligences, identifies a “naturalist” intelligence. He thus illuminates the genius of these and other greats--like American botanist Luther Burbank, not to mention Charles Darwin and John Muir.
In the agriculture area at North Hollywood High School, we seek to cultivate this naturalist intelligence by having our students cultivate gardens. In addition to broccoli, we grow tomatoes and potatoes, peas and carrots, the “three sisters” of Native American agriculture--corn, beans and squash, as well as radishes, turnips, melons, cucumbers, myriad herbs and lots of sunflowers.
Starting in the fall, we endeavor to use organic methods by having the students remove the summer’s weeds by hand. Then, we shovel last year’s compost into the soil and form plots. At the same time, we rake leaves and start new compost piles. We germinate seeds for winter and spring crops in our greenhouse and continue to weed the plots by hand throughout the year. We also practice vermiculture and aquaculture, growing worms in boxes and fish and water plants in ponds.
This stewardship of nature, given the complex relationships in ecosystems, makes for many valuable learning opportunities. It is especially true when something goes wrong, and it invariably does. Insects, fungi, weeds, broken irrigation systems, bureaucratic roadblocks, school budgets, all present dilemmas that in turn present yet more learning opportunities.
*
Of course, some of my students have problems far worse than our difficulties in the garden, and I find that they sometimes turn to the patience and beauty of nature for solace. The modern teenager in the urban public high school can find the innocence of the birds and the bees appealing. Gardening guides the students’ attention to the realities of Mother Nature, the changing temperature of the seasons, the composition of Earth itself, the wind, the rain, the petrochemical sunsets over Los Angeles.
It is hard not to be pessimistic when confronting the grim realities in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Educational reform and school construction perennially drown in a morass of mediocrity. Thus, to my students I often paraphrase Voltaire’s Candide at the conclusion of the famous novel, “I don’t know if this is the best of all possible worlds, but I am going to cultivate my garden.”
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b414d96994360826db214bdbc5e01c0f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-02-mn-63009-story.html | Tummy Trouble in Cairo | Tummy Trouble in Cairo
It is 1:30 in the morning at the packed Al Rashid nightclub, and the scene is “Arabian Nights” crossed with Studio 54.
A private nurse wearing an Islamic veil attends to a heavyset Saudi man in robe and kaffiyeh, giving him an injection at his stage-side table. Some women in the audience are in full hejab, covered in black scarves, veils and robes. Others drip diamonds from their ears and necks. Notwithstanding the hour, there are giddy children and a few Westerners who have wandered in to see the show.
And then, with a sudden throb of the tabla--an hourglass-shaped Arab drum that seems to sing with its own voice--a 20-piece orchestra swings into high gear and a barefoot female figure swirls in from the side.
Dina. She is a household name in Egypt, connoting glamour, grace and forbidden pleasures. And this season, she is Cairo’s reigning belly dancer. Lithe and mesmerizing, in a costume that is G-rated yet reveals a body sculpted by years of practice and performance, the Egyptian dancer holds her watchers in thrall for an hour.
Dina represents the pinnacle of Oriental dance--belly dance, in everyday parlance--an art form that has a long pedigree in Egypt and manages to live on in the hearts of many Egyptians.
But its performers and aficionados are worried for its future in the country where it began. During the past 20 years, the rise of political Islam in the Middle East has led to more puritanical attitudes on morality in general, creating a backlash against belly dance. Fewer hotels, clubs and Nile River boats are offering the live performances, and more and more Egyptian women are shunning the dance because of Islamic disapproval.
As a consequence, more of the dancers performing professionally in Cairo are outsiders--from Japan, South America and the countries of the former Soviet Union. They are from almost everywhere, in fact, except Egypt.
“I am here to make my name,” says Souraya Lukasova, a doctor from Uzbekistan who prefers gyrating at Cairo’s Shepherds Hotel to grappling with diseases in Tashkent. A bevy of young women like her has gravitated to Cairo from cities all over the world--hoping to find fame and big money through belly dancing.
Cairo is the heart of the entertainment industry for the Arabic-speaking world, and dancers who make it here can write their own tickets in the belly-dancing circuits of Europe, the United States, Lebanon and the Persian Gulf. (The top dancers get $3,000 or more for a 45-minute show.)
And for all the drawbacks of the biggest city in the Middle East and Africa, there is still something magical about its balmy nights and the swaying palms and bright neon lights that line the Nile. The whiff of the apple-scented hookah and the jangle of the bells on the tourist carriages hang in the air as pursuers of belly dance make their way down the gangplank to one of the several big nightclub boats.
The foreign influx arouses disdain among some purists. “We will drive these foreigners out,” vows Ronda Gamal, an Egyptian dancer on a boat where the other two regular dancers are Russian and British. But even her manager concedes that the foreigners show great love for the dance, often take tradition more seriously than the Egyptians and, on the whole, are willing to work for less money.
But how do they match up against Egyptians as interpreters of Arab music? Not very well, in the opinion of Dina, who explains it culturally.
“In Brazil, you find that the dancers there dance very well. If I was to appear and try to dance as a Brazilian girl, [the result] would be very different, because I hear the music differently,” she says. “The Brazilian has heard that music all her life. I think her feeling is different, and because of this her step is different.”
Among people in the business, there is a feeling that the market for Egyptian belly dance is not what it used to be, in part because of societal changes.
“Seven or eight years ago, the Arabs used to come here, sit with a bottle of whiskey in front of them and stay up all night watching a show,” says one club manager, Samy Saad. “Now the younger generation of Arabs goes to Europe or the United States during the holidays. They don’t go to the nightclubs. . . . They prefer to dance themselves in a disco. They want to move their bodies.”
Even for posh weddings, the long-standing tradition of hiring a belly dancer is waning, he says. “Classy people today want to have only a deejay.”
‘Something Not to Be Spoke Of’
The accounts of early European visitors to the Middle East give an idea of the first arresting impression made by the belly dance: “Nothing could be more artful or proper to raise certain Ideas, the tunes so soft, the motions so Languishing,” wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an envoy’s wife and famously observant letter writer, in 1717.
“I am very positive that even the most cold and rigid Prude upon Earth could not have looked upon them without thinking of something not to be Spoke of,” she added, as quoted by Karin van Nieuwkerk in her 1995 study of female entertainers in Egypt, “A Trade Like Any Other.”
According to Van Nieuwkerk’s research, belly dancing as it exists today owes much to the intermingling of Western and Eastern cultures. Dances traditionally were performed in Egypt by two classes of women--the awalim--educated chanteuses and poets who performed for other women in the privacy of the harem--and the ghawazi--low-status street performers and sometimes prostitutes who appeared unveiled in front of male audiences.
When Europeans began coming to Egypt in large numbers at the start of the 19th century, they imagined the East, with its sumptuous tastes, sights and smells, to be an erotically charged place and to some extent projected their beliefs on both the awalim and ghawazi.
Over the scandalized objections of Islamic clerics, women were pressured to perform before mixed-sex audiences of foreigners and in costumes that were far more revealing than the traditional long, wide skirts and blouses they had worn.
The economic power of the Europeans was being pitted against the generally conservative mores of Egyptian society: The French author Gustave Flaubert, for example, wrote of persuading two dancers to take off all their clothing; they agreed only on the condition that the musicians be blindfolded.
The traditional belly dancer’s costume--the “I Dream of Jeannie” get-up--also probably owes its provenance more to Hollywood than to anything in the Middle East.
After a Syrian dancer under the name “Little Egypt” wowed the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, her dance became a much-copied (and vulgarized) hoochie-koochie act that eventually found its way into early American movies. The costume used by the movie makers--the mask over the face, the sequined bra and chiffon pantaloons--was taken up by dancers in Cairo nightspots near the Ezbekiyya Gardens, where British soldiers congregated and caroused after Britain took control of Egypt’s monarchy in 1882.
There is something about performing the belly dance that appeals to many women and some men. Undoubtedly it uses all the muscles of the body. A good dancer has the ability to stir deep emotions in her audience. Egyptian superstar Fifi Abdou, for instance, has been said to bring audiences to tears with her dancing.
Yet in Egypt, it is an insult to be called the “son of a dancer.” Van Nieuwkerk, a Dutch social anthropologist, argues that in Egyptian culture, all women are regarded as potentially threatening sexual beings. Dancers are viewed as particularly shameful because, unlike “decent women,” they “use their bodies to make a living, instead of hiding them as much as possible,” she says.
Dina Overcame Family Disapproval
In the past, female entertainers would pass on their skills to their daughters, leading to fresh generations of performers. Now that source seems to be drying up. Even some big-name artists such as Dina had to battle family disapproval. (Dina’s father insisted that she finish college. She studied by day while dancing at night, eventually earning a master’s degree in philosophy before he finally gave in to her career choice.)
According to the Egyptian Arts Authority, 5,000 professional belly dancers were registered in 1957, compared with only 372 today. Mindful of the increasing preponderance of outsiders, the Egyptian Dance Group recently called on the authorities to stop licensing so many foreigners, Cairo’s Egyptian Gazette reported.
By law, dancers cannot perform on television in Egypt. Police monitor nightclubs to ensure that dancers’ costumes are sufficiently modest, with slitted skirts that start below the knee. The navel is always supposed to be covered, if only by transparent material.
And yet, ask an Egyptian, and he or she will tell you that every Egyptian woman can belly dance. “It is in our blood,” Dina says.
One of the many foreigners plying the trade is Liza Laziza, a Briton who says her chance discovery of an innate belly-dancing talent some years back was like a “call from God.” It is difficult for foreigners to master belly dance, she agrees, but not impossible.
Liza (it’s the custom for dancers to use first names as their stage names) performs four or five times a week on the Nile Maxim, one of the fancier dinner-cruise ships that sail twice nightly. The early cruise leaves at 8 p.m. and is patronized largely by Western tourists. The second leaves at 11:30, an hour more suited to Egyptians and visitors from the Persian Gulf countries, who in summertime adopt an extremely nocturnal existence.
If Cairo--in Liza’s words--is the “central nervous center” of belly dance worldwide, Mohammed Ali Street near the Abdeen Palace was once the cortex. It was a neighborhood for entertainers and musicians, where instrumentalists, vocalists and dancers lived and loitered in the coffee shops, available to be hired for weddings, private parties and nightclubs.
Not so many live there now, but agents and costume makers still keep offices in the area.
One of the chief costume makers, Ahmed Diaa Din, says he is amazed at how, in addition to local trade, orders for belly-dancing costumes pour into his fax machine from all over the world.
“Now everyone wants the tight dresses and short skirts and pants. This has nothing to do with traditional Oriental style,” he complains. “But I do what the customer wants.”
Foreign Performers Value Authenticity
The customers more apt to go for something traditional are the foreigners, who seek to be as authentic as possible, he says. Meanwhile, Egyptians increasingly patronize foreign dancers “because they are different.”
“In Germany and Holland, there are belly-dancing schools starting from kindergarten all the way to secondary school,” Diaa Din says. “I wish it was the same in Egypt.”
Diaa Din discerns a possible trend in Egypt toward more intimate venues than the stage: Lately, Egyptian brides have been buying dancing togs for their trousseaux.
In the world of Egyptian belly dance, there is a clear line between the top-shelf “five-star” dancers and the women who perform in the cheap clubs and honky-tonks scattered throughout downtown Cairo and along the old nightclub district on Pyramids Road in Giza.
The women of the latter places, known pejoratively as “cabarets,” are expected to show less artistry in their movements and more skill in eliciting tips. These women can pick out the big spender in a room and may devote much of their night to dancing directly in front of that person, who responds by throwing out wads of Egyptian 10-pound notes (about $3 apiece) that float down like butterflies over the dancer. A club employee is at hand to scoop up the currency almost as soon as it touches the floor.
Watch Out for the $10 Peanuts
These sorts of clubs--which only get going between midnight and 6 a.m.--are also famous for soaking anyone seeking their tawdry thrills. As soon as a customer sits down, bottles of beer are opened and plates holding a few peanuts and sunflower seeds are set out, unsolicited, on the table. Woe to the guest foolish enough to actually eat the nuts, which may cost $10. A bottle of whiskey might run into the hundreds of dollars.
On a recent evening at the Palmyra Club in downtown Cairo, a drunk kept trying to dance in front of the belly dancer, and finally managed to stuff some cash into her brassiere, giving a triumphant look to his companions, who howled approval. Such goings-on are illegal, of course; no one is supposed to touch the belly dancer. At the same time, no one involved seemed all that upset.
With such scenes in mind, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that belly dancing will somehow survive here, the artistic and naughty alike, weathering foreign invaders and the current moralistic fervor of some Egyptians.
“It’s like eating beans for breakfast,” Essam Mounir, a musician and the agent for Ronda Gamal, says with a smile. “Anyone will tell you it’s not good for you, but all Egyptians do it.”
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820f2bcb98785d768b1cac94a45ac5f7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-03-mn-63882-story.html | Miami Police Officers Stung by Criticism of Prostitution Stings | Miami Police Officers Stung by Criticism of Prostitution Stings
To fight crime in the Edgewater neighborhood, police have traded in their uniforms for a sexier look: shorts, tight blouses and a come-hither smile. Some officers have parked their patrol cars to lean up against lampposts. Others not posing as prostitutes may be packing their service revolvers under the shabby clothes of a vagrant.
“You see the homeless people out there? Well, many of those guys with shopping carts are my guys,” said Miami police Lt. Mario Garcia. “Male and female. And I put officers out there as flower vendors, gardeners and street sweepers too.”
According to Garcia, the undercover operations--along with more traditional policing--are helping to turn around a once-grand neighborhood blighted by poverty and neglect. Crime in Edgewater and the adjacent Wynwood section is down 44% from five years ago, according to police statistics. Abandoned houses used as crack dens have been demolished, street lights have been turned up, and--at long last in this historic neighborhood straddling Biscayne Boulevard just north of downtown--the renaissance may be underway.
But using both male and female officers as decoys to conduct sting operations aimed at men soliciting prostitutes also has sparked controversy, in part because of the who’s-who credentials of some of those arrested. Among those nabbed for allegedly soliciting sex on the street are a pro football player, a county judge and--in just the last five weeks--a prominent priest, a high-ranking police officer and a school board official.
The arrest July 5 of the Rev. Patrick H. O’Neill, a former university president serving as chairman of the Miami Archdiocese evangelical program, caused a public outcry over the ethics of sting operations and the detailed coverage of his case by local news media.
But Garcia, commander of the neighborhood police substation, asserted that the crime crackdown sends a message. “I want the public to know that people are tired of these folks. We take no pleasure in arresting high-profile people. But if you’re coming into the neighborhood looking for cheap sex, we’re going to get you.”
In the last three years, Garcia said, area police have made more than 1,500 misdemeanor arrests involving prostitution. Lately, the average number of arrests per sting operation has fallen from 20 to about six, Garcia said, an indication that “people know we’re out there.”
Under a vehicle impoundment program in which accused “johns” must pay a flat $1,000 fee to get their cars back, the stings also pump cash into the city’s general fund.
“I feel pretty safe” here, said Sergio Guadix, administrator of Edgewater’s Neighborhood Enhancement Team, a city agency. “And three, four years ago, I don’t know if I would have felt that way.”
But John DeLeon, president of the Miami chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, scoffs at the notion that police stings have anything to do with upgrading the neighborhood. Rather, he said, gentrification does.
Moreover, DeLeon said, “it is unconscionable to have police officers standing out there wearing provocative clothing, clearly there to be picked up. That’s enticement, maybe entrapment.
“Besides,” added DeLeon, a lawyer, “prostitution should not be criminalized.”
Also troubled by police stings is local resident Reginald A. Richardson, a Miami-Dade County civil court judge. He was one of those stung.
“I have gone through two years of hardship, the embarrassment of guilt by association, and a whole lot of money,” said Richardson. After two trials, he was acquitted of charges that he offered an undercover cop $20 for a sexual favor. He faces an October reprimand before the state Supreme Court for violating the judicial code by telling arresting officers he was a “pro-police” judge. He is running for reelection this fall.
Richardson, 51, said he supports efforts to clean up Edgewater and even approves of undercover operations. “Prostitution is the tip of the iceberg. It segues into drug traffic, strong-armed robbery. So I’m all for stings.”
In his case, however, Richardson insists that he was entrapped by a female police officer who seemed to be in distress and waved as he drove by one evening in 1998. “I stop and help people even when my wife and kids are in the car. And I am frustrated by the notion that I can no longer do that.”
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Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.
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4bda0301650229a972a5be09d3388dc6 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-06-ca-65199-story.html | Something a Little Less Wild | Something a Little Less Wild
Melanie Griffith is like someone who is constantly at her own surprise birthday party opening gifts in front of a roomful of people. Even at age 42, she’s still prone to outbursts of mirthful ebullience, but these days laced with healthy doses of self-awareness.
Director John Waters, whose “Cecil B. Demented,” which opens Friday, stars Griffith, says he thinks her disposition arises from “a combination of a good sense of humor and a little bit of defiance. Like me, she’s someone with a past who has made peace with it. Nobody can blackmail her. So she’s happy. And why shouldn’t she be? She has a wonderful family. She’s married to Antonio Banderas. And Tippi Hedren is her mother!”
An unorthodox off-screen life has, at times, overshadowed Griffith’s professional pursuits--a drug and alcohol binge followed by the obligatory rehab, her three other marriages (once to actor Steven Bauer, twice to Don Johnson) and cosmetic surgery (lips, breasts). Her affair with Banderas while both were still married to others (Griffith to Johnson, and Banderas to Spanish actress Ana Leza) became headline news around the world. The feeding frenzy continues even though she and Banderas are now married with a 4-year-old daughter, Stella.
“My mother-in-law called me from Spain the other day and asked if I was OK because she heard on the news that I was in the hospital--for anguish,” she says in that unmistakable voice, permanently caught midway between a purr and a rasp. The tabloids are “always looking for a problem,” she complains. “They never tell the truth. They never get it right.”
For a week, she’s been trailed by a photographer, who has stationed himself outside her home in Hancock Park. “Antonio, Stella and I went out for a walk with the dogs the other day and he followed us in his car. How tacky,” she says, her dander thoroughly up.
“Doesn’t he have anything better to do than scurry around like a rat? You would think these guys would get themselves a meaningful job. I mean, what do they tell their kids? ‘I follow famous people around and take pictures of them and sell them.’ There’s not much integrity in that.”
The photographer will have to move on, because Griffith planned to spend the rest of the summer in Europe. After a quick stop in Sicily at the Taormina Film Festival, where she was honored with a retrospective (“I thought you had to be dead for that”), she headed to Spain, and she’ll go to Ireland this month to shoot a new film, “Limo Man.” Then it’s back home in September so the kids can start school.
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Griffith has not been easy to pin down. The official explanation is that she’s busy with her family, tending to the summer activities of her three children, ages 15, 11 and 4. But it’s also true that she’s a little gun-shy when it comes to the media. Nonetheless, she doesn’t dodge questions or proffer suitable-for-all-occasions responses. As in even her most tepid movie projects, she dives in without a life preserver. How many actresses will casually mention in passing that she wouldn’t have cheated on one of her past husbands if he hadn’t cheated on her first?
She first appears as something of a mirage. While the receptionist at her West L.A.-based Internet company, One World Networks, pages her and presses button after button trying to find Griffith, she floats past in a black pinstriped suit and high heels, laughs as if without a care--and vanishes. When she returns 10 minutes later, her greeting is warm yet guarded, as if she’s admiring a handsomely wrapped present and hoping that what’s inside doesn’t disappoint.
Waters is right. It would be hard to find a way to blackmail her. In the quarter-century since she made her film debut--yes, it’s been that long--in 1975’s “Night Moves” and held her own against seasoned pro Gene Hackman, Griffith has had enough career reversals to give John Travolta the bends. For every good movie like “Working Girl” (which brought her an Oscar nomination) and “Something Wild,” she’s been in tankers like “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “Paradise.”
There have been missed opportunities as well. She had to turn down both “As Good as It Gets” and “The Sheltering Sky” because of pregnancy. (She also passed on the scripts for “Basic Instinct” and “Thelma & Louise.”) But even in her turkeys, it’s usually the projects that let Griffith down and not the other way around. And when she’s in a good movie she can be a real star.
In “Nobody’s Fool,” opposite Paul Newman, she displays a kind of touching vulnerability reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe. Her unique vocal inflections in films like Brian De Palma’s “Body Double” recall Judy Holliday (her subsequent appearance in the misbegotten remake of the classic “Born Yesterday” notwithstanding). In Woody Allen’s “Celebrity,” and especially Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild,” Griffith flashes a kind of healthy, unfettered sexuality that bears comparison to Tuesday Weld.
Still, the good films have often been spaced so far apart that every time she turns in a good performance--like her bracingly honest heroin addict in 1998’s little-seen independent film “Another Day in Paradise,” co-starring James Woods, and her introspective portrayal last year of Marion Davies in HBO’s “RKO 281,” which earned her an Emmy nomination--one critic or another makes the startling discovery that the woman can actually act.
As with “RKO 281,” “Cecil B. Demented” is a commentary on celebrity, and Griffith charges out swinging. She portrays a deliciously bitchy icon just slightly past her prime who in the course of the film gets her consciousness raised--Patty Hearst-style. Even in the movie’s less focused moments, Griffith is its solid center.
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With three children at various stages of development, her life requires a great deal of strategic planning, she says. Son Alexander Bauer accompanied her to Taormina. She’ll hand off Stella to her nanny and reunite with them in Spain. Older daughter Dakota (by Johnson) is at summer camp in Carmel. “She must be having fun because I haven’t heard a word from her in two weeks,” she says with mock maternal dismay. Another nanny is being sent to pick up Dakota and bring her to Spain.
A show-business daughter herself, Griffith endeavors to be more soccer mom than Hollywood mom. The kids usually travel to locations with her, and she and Banderas try to arrange jobs so they’re never working at the same time. Since Alexander was born 15 years ago, her priority has primarily been tending the nest. So it’s not surprising that when she talks about her career--her work with Waters, her upcoming projects--it’s usually sound-bite time.
But when the conversation turns to family, she leaps to life like a proud mama lion: Alexander is “very intelligent, very beautiful physically. He’s like an old soul. He’s 15 now, and soon he’s going to be driving and all that stuff. Last year he went away to boarding school in Colorado, which was great for him, but hard on me. My God, my baby. Do you know that I’ve been with him as a person longer than anyone I’ve known?”
If Alexander is the old soul, Dakota is the new spirit. “She’s into dance, gymnastics, very rhythmic.” Of the two, she seems more likely to follow in her mother’s footsteps, though Griffith has counseled her to finish her education “so she can have something to fall back on.” Again, she catches herself sounding like a mother and laughs.
As for Stella, “every day she blows my mind. I’m so glad I had her when I was older. I have more patience now, more interest. When I had Alexander, I was only 27 and struggling to keep it all together. It was scary as hell. After three, it’s really easy. You know what to expect. You know they’re not going to break.” She intends to add to her brood, she says, at least one by natural childbirth and perhaps an adoption. Even One World Networks, of which she is co-founder and managing director, is merely a means for her to reach her goal of making $100 million so that she and her progeny will never have to worry about money.
*
“Isn’t it cool?” she says, clicking on to the company Web site. One World, she explains, which has been in operation since January, was founded by Griffith and three other women: investment banker Liz Edlic and two former marketing executives, Nancy Duitch and Rachel Edlich. “Did you know that our [Chief Technical Officer] Nancy Tyler was a rocket scientist?” she enthuses. (Tyler previously worked for Rockwell International.) Asked to define One World Networks, Griffith is not very specific. “It’s a safe place on the Internet, like clicking through a community.” Whatever that means.
Fortunately, a few minutes later the rocket scientist happens by. Tyler offers a more complete description. “One World does merchandising and promotions for celebrities and experts [fitness trainers, nutritionists, et al]. We find solutions to help them merchandise and extend their brand on TV, radio and online.” When a reporter suggests that it sounds suspiciously like a glorified shopping site, Tyler concedes there’s some truth to that. In any case, she says, One World tries to make sure that whatever it sells--from cosmetics to protein powder--is worth its customers’ devotion.
Clicking on to OneWorldLive.com, one can also surf over to Griffith’s own celebrity Web site (and soon Banderas’ as well), which promises to help the visitor “discover the goddess in you"--which sounds like a heck of a lot more fun than locating your inner child.
“It’s a great place for celebrities to be able to control their image,” she says, launching into another of her peeves, a two-year battle to win back the rights to her own name.
“Five years ago, people started buying celebrity names on the Web,” Griffith explains. “It only costs $70 to establish a celebrity dot-com. This guy [registered] my name and about 200 others. . . . So I called him and said, ‘I would like my name back, thank you very much.’ And he wouldn’t give it to me!
“Then he asked for an outrageous sum of money. Some people actually paid him. Fortunately this cyber act was passed and I was able to get my name back for 70 bucks.”
Griffith then unleashes her own inner goddess, pulling out a port-able fan and lighting a cigarette, which seems more than a little politically incorrect (not to mention illegal) under the circumstances. “I guess it’s a bit of a contradiction,” she says and giggles.
Though she’s definitely settled and mellower, Griffith will never be mistaken for a Carmelite nun. As Waters suggested, there’s still a remnant of the headstrong young woman who left home at 14 to move in with 19-year-old Don Johnson. After a brief marriage to the actor, she began working steadily in movies such as “Night Moves,” “The Drowning Pool” with Newman and the teen beauty contest satire “Smile.”
By the end of her teens, she was not only acting regularly but also regularly acting out. “I didn’t get to have a childhood,” she says with a sigh. “An acting teacher once said to me that acting is a child’s game played by adults, which is fine. But when you’re a kid, it’s very stressful to have to be so responsible. You can’t mess up. It’s too much pressure. If I hadn’t gone to work so young, I would have had time to develop emotionally much sooner.”
It took several years to bring what she calls her “addictive personality” under control, she says. And she realizes how close she came to becoming a Hollywood casualty.
“Last year I did a movie called ‘Forever Lulu’ that hasn’t been released yet. I played a paranoid schizophrenic, and I was very comfortable in that role. I met with a lot of women who are on heavy medication, and I didn’t see a lot of difference between them and myself. I think actors are on the borderline of being insane and normal.
“Did you see that TV show the other night on Judy Garland? I didn’t know that she was schizophrenic. But it makes so much sense, given her behavior. She could give her all on screen, but when it came to her personal life, she hadn’t been taught to nurture herself. So she had these addictions to take the pain away.
“Actors can be so vulnerable, so raw because they have to be open to everybody and everything. But in your real life you have to be taught how to deal with that vulnerability. I don’t think we’re all necessarily schizophrenic. But we’re more sensitive than the average person. Does that make sense?”
Griffith specifically recalls the moment when her instinct for self-preservation kicked in. She was 19 and overheard one actress remark about another: “Look at her. She’s never going to make it.” Griffith knew the woman could just as easily have been talking about her. “And that’s when I decided, I am going to make it, [expletive].”
The way she was raised, Griffith doesn’t feel she ever developed the emotional foundation that might have helped her overcome these obstacles more quickly. “Growing up in my generation, I was never told about how to make myself strong--the kind of normal conversations I have now with my kids. With Dakota, I talk about sex and being proud of herself and her body and not going with the first guy who kisses her and makes her go a little wacko and thinking that she owes him.”
Although she and Hedren have a caring mother-daughter bond, Griffith implies that they are not exactly what one would call close. “You have to remember I only lived with my mother for 14 years,” she says. “I’ve had more life without her. She gave me life, but we separated early and she’s not extremely involved. She’s got her country out there and her animals. I think she’s very brave in her endeavor to save wild animals. It’s a great cause, but it takes up all her time.”
*
Through her relationship with Banderas, she says, she has become part of his extended family in Spain. “I feel very comfortable there, like it’s my home too. His family is different, entwined, solid. He’s built a life, a foundation and they’re very proud of him. I’ve noticed a big difference in my children when they’re over there.
“With Antonio’s family, I can relax and I know the kids will be looked after. Nothing against my family, but it’s not the American way. Here it’s an imposition to put the kids on your whole family.”
Her relationship with Banderas is founded on mutual commitment, she says. And for the first time in her life she’s ready to abide by it. She’s made the promise before, “but I never really felt it,” she admits. “I know that as long as I’m faithful to him, he’s going to be faithful to me. And that’s the only link in the chain, that if it was broken, would destroy our marriage. Everything else we can deal with. That’s the only thing. Don’t betray me. I have to be able to trust. That’s on both sides.”
The stability of her relationship has enabled her to expand into being a businesswoman and to endure the vicissitudes of being an actress in her 40s.
“I’m looking forward to the rest of my life,” she says with a self-satisfied laugh. “The older I get, the more I can handle emotionally and intellectually. I want to experience life and keep going and not get depressed if people say I’m over the hill or something like that. That’s why I love my Revlon ad. ‘Defy it.’ Whatever they say I can’t do, [expletive] ‘em, I can. And that’s what I’m going to do, defy it.”
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2501be88668d8e7d35ad1a36769c8a57 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-07-cl-35-story.html | Payback Time for a Beloved Guitar Man | Payback Time for a Beloved Guitar Man
People buying tickets for a two-night concert at the Santa Monica Civic on Tuesday and Wednesday with Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, David Crosby, Emmylou Harris and Bonnie Raitt might be puzzled that it’s a benefit concert for Fred Walecki and family.
No, he hasn’t been in the news or featured on “Extra.” Walecki owns a music store--Westwood Music, a place that’s been in his family since he was born 53 years ago. He’s sold guitars to some of the most well-known names in music, and has been entrusted with the repair of valuable and beloved instruments.
In the ‘70s, when Los Angeles was home to more rock music stars than anywhere on earth, it wasn’t unusual to walk into the store, then located on Westwood Boulevard, and see Browne or Neil Young trying out a guitar, or the Eagles’ Glenn Frey buying guitar picks.
It was a place where musicians loved to hang out, the place where somebody like Bonnie Raitt, who went to University High with Walecki, might phone from the road in urgent need of a replacement guitar. It was a place, too, where Fred might look you in the eye and tell you you were wrecking your life with drugs and needed to go into treatment. Several people would come to feel they owed him their sobriety.
Walecki was always available, always cheerful, and always seen with a cigarette. Several months ago, he got the diagnosis: throat cancer, growing so quickly that there was no choice but to remove his voice box. He now speaks through an artificial-voice device, requiring him to hold a small microphone to his throat.
Those close to Walecki knew that despite his positive outlook and the resilience of his wife, Cathy, and their two young children, the medical expenses not covered by his insurance were more than he could handle.
Enter Bernie Leadon, an old friend and one of the four original Eagles, and Glyn Johns, the legendary producer who has worked with the Beatles, Eric Clapton, the Eagles and the Rolling Stones. The idea for a benefit concert was born.
“Emmylou Harris, Jackson Browne and David Crosby were the first to say yes,” Leadon says. Crosby suggested they contact Tom Campbell, whose company, the Guacamole Fund, has put together benefit concerts on behalf of individuals and social issues for the past 25 years.
Each artist who was approached committed without hesitation: Warren Zevon, Chris Hillman and Randy Meisner joined the list. Browne came up with the concert billing, “Gathering of the Clan,” which the musicians said symbolized the way they’d gathered for so long under Fred’s roof.
“Not a sweeter soul walks this earth,” said Hillman.
“When I grow up, I want to be Fred Walecki,” Harris added.
“They’re paying him back for his kindness and generosity over the years,” Glyn Johns said earlier this week as he prepared to fly here from London for the concert.
The latest addition is Don Henley, who has been on tour, and has adjusted his schedule to perform Wednesday night.
“I’ve learned a lot about strength and character just by watching Walecki go through this ordeal,” Henley said.
Walecki’s father, Herman Walecki, opened the store in 1947, catering mostly to classical musicians. Fred started working there when he was 14, repairing instruments. Four years later his father died. Fred quit school and took over the store, changing its focus to the guitar-based music he’d grown up with.
The store has been located on Santa Monica Boulevard for the last six years and--like other small music stores and bookstores--has lost business to the new mega-stores that offer lower prices but less camaraderie.
Walecki has been moved by the attention. He fondly recounts a moment in the hospital when, under the haze of sedation, he pressed a button to summon a nurse for more pain medication, only to have Henley walk into the room first for an unexpected visit.
“If someone offered to give me back my voice in exchange for knowing this kind of friendship,” he said, “I wouldn’t take the offer.”
“If someone offered to give me back my voice in exchange for knowing this kind of friendship, I wouldn’t take the offer.”
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81ea4686cd384c2687967509a70e8fed | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-07-mn-109-story.html | Anti-Fraud Drive Proves Costly for Employees | Anti-Fraud Drive Proves Costly for Employees
A decade-old campaign against workers’ compensation fraud in California is part of a much broader national effort to save money for employers and insurers at the expense of workers, according to legal scholars and researchers who specialize in the field.
The effort to shift costs from employers and insurers to workers took shape in the late 1980s, and gathered steam in the early 1990s when the nation’s economy was staggering from a recession. It took different forms in different states, but it almost always included an anti-fraud element around which popular and legislative support coalesced for other, more technical changes that often had far greater impacts.
“It was a crisis, and the insurers needed ways to persuade the legislatures to restrict their costs,” said Edward Welch, director of the Workers’ Compensation Center at Michigan State University. “Fraud was one of the images they used to justify narrowing eligibility, changing the way you measure benefits and basically saving money for employers at the expense of injured workers.”
Spokesmen for insurance associations deny any conspiracy.
But the overall result has been a boon for business and a burden for workers. Insurers and employers have cut costs while workers have lost benefits.
Today, many observers believe that prosecutions and workplace practices have left some workers scared to file legitimate claims. Many of those who do file get less than they once would have: Benefits in some cases have shrunken, eroded either by inflation or direct cutbacks. Some injuries are no longer covered at all.
With the exception of Southern California, where peculiar circumstances created a significant fraud problem centered on medical-legal mills in the late 1980s and early 1990s, no evidence has surfaced suggesting that workers lie very often about their on-the-job injuries.
“Most thoughtful people who do a lot of research in workers’ comp would come to the conclusion that there is not a lot of fraud in the system,” said Rand Corp. economist Robert Reville. “By making a claim that there was a lot of fraud, I think they [insurance carriers] were benefiting at workers’ expense [and] discouraging workers from filing claims.”
Since the Alliance of American Insurers announced that it was making workers’ compensation insurance fraud a legislative priority in 1989, more than two-thirds of the states, including California, enacted laws that made insurance fraud a felony. California and many other states also launched formal anti-fraud enforcement efforts. Very little fraud--involving far less than 1% of all cases--has been proven.
Meanwhile, other legislative changes engineered by employers and insurers have stretched the fundamental bargain behind America’s system of compensating injured workers. That bargain was forged nearly a century ago, when workers gave up the chance to sue employers in court for huge sums for on-the-job injuries. In return, workers got the certain ability to collect modest sums regardless of who was at fault.
Over the last decade, employers and insurance carriers have saved billions of dollars as legislatures in many states rolled back benefits, more narrowly defined workplace injuries and introduced impediments to collecting for them.
Employer costs declined by more than one-third as a percentage of payroll and by $8.5 billion in constant dollars, according to the nonprofit, nonpartisan National Academy of Social Insurance.
Insurers went from losing eight cents on each dollar of premium to making 15 or 20 cents, said John F. Burton Jr., dean of the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations.
Labor “got handed our shorts,” said Jim Ellenberger, assistant director of occupational safety and health for the national AFL-CIO.
Major Changes in the Law
Among the key changes, according to workers’ compensation economists and legal scholars, were that:
* Some states reduced payments for the partial but permanent disabilities that account for the majority of workers’ compensation benefits. Connecticut slashed these benefits--which are intended to compensate for current and future lost earnings--by 27%. Florida cut in half the length of time an injured worker is eligible to receive them.
Texas employed a much more conservative standard for calculating them. And California let inflation do the work. For about half of injured workers, those with relatively minor permanent disabilities, benefits were held constant in the face of rising costs. The effect: Benefits dropped 40% in value since 1984.
* Other states such as Oregon, the Dakotas and Nevada changed standards of proof for workplace injuries. They required that workers show that their injuries were mainly work-related, not mainly the result of preexisting health conditions.
That was a big change, particularly for older workers who were more likely to have chronic, underlying conditions aggravated by work. Under the new standard, an Oregon court found that a worker who had occupationally caused lung disease was not eligible for benefits because his preexisting breathing problem left him susceptible to the disease.
* Other states reduced or eliminated compensation for certain types of hard-to-validate injuries. Virginia, Montana and Louisiana tightened rules on compensating workers for the fastest-growing type of ailment, involving musculoskeletal problems from repetitive stresses of activities like scanning prices on grocery checkout lines and typing all day at computer keyboards.
Kentucky, Florida, Oklahoma, Wyoming and West Virginia barred mental stress claims arising from work unless the stress arose from a physical injury at work.
California required an employee to prove that work, rather than some other aspect of life, was the predominant cause of the stress, and it outlawed payments for any stress case in which the employer didn’t intend to cause harm.
The changes amounted to a major retrenchment, reversing decades of rising benefits and expanding coverage, and profoundly altering the understanding of how society would come to the aid of workers who were hurt on the job.
State legislatures enacted the changes after a period of rising costs in the 1970s and 1980s. Despite the rising costs, many insurers were still able to make handsome profits. They passed on increased costs to their employer clients and enjoyed large profits from investing in high-yield bonds.
But as those investment opportunities disappeared in a period of low inflation, the industry declared itself in a crisis. When recession hit, employers joined them.
In state after state, employers warned legislatures that they would have to pull up stakes and leave if no solutions to skyrocketing premiums were found.
“This whipsawing between states” fed “the benefits-cutting frenzy,” said Timothy Morse, a workers’ compensation researcher at the University of Connecticut.
As benefits were cut, reported on-the-job injuries plummeted.
The big question, even today, is: Why?
There are a number of possibilities. Some point to the healthy economy. Claims tend to fall off in good economic times, economists say, when workers apparently would rather keep working, even if it hurts, than lose money collecting workers’ compensation. Others cite safer workplaces or the anti-fraud campaign itself.
Fear of Filing Insurance Claims
Since fraud, by its nature, involves deceit, no one knows how much of it there is or was. But that hasn’t stopped people from speculating. At the height of anti-fraud fever in California, then-Gov. Pete Wilson came in at the high end, asserting without proof that 30% of all claims were bogus.
“We cringe when we hear the industry say 30% of workers’ comp claims are fraudulent,” said Dennis Jay, director of the national Coalition Against Insurance Fraud. “But is it 10%? Eight percent? Five percent?”
Jay said he did not know.
Assuming that even the highest estimates are correct, recent academic studies strongly suggest that American workers are more likely to be stoics than cheats.
In a nationwide survey of 26,000 households containing 70,000 people conducted in 1989, Rand found that one-quarter of the households contained people who had been injured on the job.
But only half of those with workplace injuries that required doctor or even hospital care filed workers’ compensation claims. Even among those who reported missing more than seven days of work, fewer than half said they filed claims.
More recently, studies in Michigan, Connecticut and Maryland have found that only one out of four workers being treated for work-related musculoskeletal problems filed claims.
Many said they did not file because they did not think their injuries were serious enough or because they could get coverage through group health insurance.
But 20% of the workers in the Michigan study who did not file also cited fears that they would be fired, or denied promotions, or thought ill of by their colleagues or bosses.
The insurance industry says it is sure that the anti-fraud campaign has worked. Economists working for the industry did a study concluding that without the campaign, costs would be nearly 20% higher.
But, if that is correct, is that a good thing? Have only fraudulent claimants been driven from the system?
The anti-fraud campaign has also grafted a kind of social stigma onto the filing of a claim, said Boston University professor Leslie Boden.
Recipients of workers’ compensation are now widely viewed as malingerers or cheats, said Boden, not as hard workers who have been injured yet will receive meager benefits.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Low Benefits
California has the 42nd-lowest temporary total disability benefits of the 50 states. Most states replace 100% of the average weekly wage. California replaces 72%.
Average weekly wage in California
$684 per week
*
Maximum benefits in California
$490 per week
*
Permanent partial disability benefits do not fully compensate for the loss of income caused by an injury. A study comparing long-term experience of co-workers found that incomes of those who were injured suffered even when benefits were taken into account.
Injured worker’s earnings in 5 years: $130,000
Benefits: $19,000
*
Uninjured worker’s earnings in 5 years: $169,000
Source: Rand, AFL-CIO, California Division of Workers’ Compensation
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Profits and Losses
Workers’ compensation insurers’ profits have fluctuated wildly. The industry got a boost in the 1990s when benefits were cut.
*
Workers’ Compensation Insurers’ Overall Profit Nationwide
*
Note: Unlike the rest of the insurance industry, California insurers had profit margins that were artificially
propped up until 1995, when government price-setting was eliminated. A period of cutthroat competition
ensued in which insurers slashed rates in bids to keep customers and subsequently have lost money. *
Source: John Burton, professor at Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations
*
Employers’ Premiums Nationwide*
* Costs in 1982-84 dollars
Source: National Academy of Social Insurance
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a06f5fa067f46e013e632193f0ae1ce5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-10-mn-2091-story.html | Clinton Presents Medals to 15 Heroes | Clinton Presents Medals to 15 Heroes
With barely five months remaining in his presidency, President Clinton presented the Medal of Freedom on Wednesday to 15 Americans, honoring among others heroes of the Democratic Party’s most liberal factions with whom he often has been at odds.
The honorees included former Sen. George S. McGovern, the South Dakota Democrat whose campaign for the presidency, fueled by sentiment against the Vietnam War, was swamped by Richard Nixon in 1972. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader who has sought the Democratic presidential nomination, also was awarded a medal.
So, too, were Cruz Reynoso, the first Latino member of the California Supreme Court, and Simon Wiesenthal, the 91-year-old Holocaust survivor whose work, the award citation said, has “ensured the arrest of more than 1,000 war criminals.”
Wiesenthal, who Clinton said recently had been injured in Vienna, was said to have listened to the ceremony by telephone and was represented by Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
The ceremony, likely to be the last formal presentation of the Medal of Freedom in the Clinton White House, gave the president and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton an opportunity to recognize the work of personal heroes, as well as others--some widely known, others less so--who, the president said, have shown a “devotion to freedom” and have added “richness and depth” to American life.
The other honorees:
* Jim Burke, chief executive officer of Johnson & Johnson and chairman of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.
* The late Sen. John H. Chafee (R-R.I.), who had a long career of public service.
* Retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who led the North Atlantic Treaty Organization campaign in the Kosovo war.
* Retired Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ambassador to Britain.
* Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund for whom the first lady once worked. Edelman was sharply critical of the administration’s welfare reform program.
* Economist and former ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith.
* Msgr. George G. Higgins, a champion of workers’ rights for more than 50 years.
* Mildred Jeffrey, an early leader of the United Auto Workers and a founding member of the National Women’s Political Caucus.
* Mathilde Krim, who established the AIDS Medical Foundation in 1983 to raise public awareness of the disease.
* Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), the only American to have served four successive presidents in high-level positions.
* The Rev. Gardner Calvin Taylor, honored for his sermons and his work as a civil rights pioneer.
The medals were established in 1963 by President Kennedy to recognize the work of Americans who advance freedom in peacetime. He was assassinated before he could present the award to anyone.
Potential nominees are recommended by members of the public and White House staff and final decisions are made by the president. Clinton generally has presented the awards to those who, an aide said, have made contributions to “a civil society.”
Jackson, who sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, “has preached a gospel of hope, unity and responsibility and has helped establish common ground across lines of race, class, gender, nationality and faith,” his citation read.
Jackson founded an organization now known as Rainbow/PUSH, and Clinton said: “Push is what Jesse does when he thinks I’m not doing right.”
McGovern was cited, among other achievements, for his current work as the U.S. representative to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization and his efforts to enact a plan to feed 500 million of the world’s hungry by 2015.
“George McGovern is one of the greatest humanitarians of our time and the world will benefit from his legacy for generations to come,” said the citation.
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0b1cf429db8652d09b789f107d68f389 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-12-fi-3290-story.html | Disney Ordered to Pay $240 Million in Suit | Disney Ordered to Pay $240 Million in Suit
Walt Disney Co. must pay $240 million to two men who accused executives of the world’s No. 2 media company of stealing their idea for a sports-theme amusement park, a Florida jury found.
Jurors in Orange County Circuit Court in Orlando deliberated for 12 hours before finding that Disney should pay damages for misappropriating trade secrets in connection with its Wide World of Sports complex, court officials said.
Nicholas Stracick, a former baseball umpire, and architect Edward Russell sued in 1997, alleging Disney executives had gotten the idea for the sports park after seeing their plans and a model for such a facility in a 1987 meeting. Disney denied the allegations.
“The evidence was overwhelming that the idea for the sports complex was independently created by Walt Disney employees,” said Louis M. Meisinger, Disney’s executive vice president and general counsel. “We feel that this verdict was driven by [an] appeal to the jury’s prejudices against corporations and business in general.”
Lawyers for Stracick, Russell and their company, All Pro Sports Camps Inc., weren’t immediately available to comment on the verdict.
Disney’s sports park includes a stadium that is the spring training home for major league baseball’s Atlanta Braves. It also offers facilities for other sports.
Stracick’s and Russell’s lawyers had sought $1.6 billion in damages in the case, saying that’s how much the idea for the sports complex has been worth to Disney since it opened three years ago.
Disney executives said Stracick’s and Russell’s earlier suits over the sports park dispute had been dismissed in both state and federal court.
“We have a high level of confidence that this verdict will be set aside,” Meisinger said.
Shares of Burbank-based Disney rose 38 cents to $40.88 on the New York Stock Exchange.
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af8ef94c7b9ae4c0a39cb6313c15e922 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-18-ca-6310-story.html | ‘Original Kings of Comedy,’ Telling It Like It Is | ‘Original Kings of Comedy,’ Telling It Like It Is
No wonder “The Kings of Comedy” tour, organized in 1997 by producer Walter Latham, has become the highest-grossing comedy tour in history, with ticket sales exceeding $37 million. Any of its four Kings--Steve Harvey, D.L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer and Bernie Mac--in a solo performance would be hilarious, so you can well imagine that the laughter just keeps building as one comedian follows another to create an unforgettable evening.
Spike Lee, no less, has created a dynamite concert film, called “The Original Kings of Comedy,” shot in February during a pair of performances in Charlotte, N.C. The convergence of these sensational comedians is reason enough to film them in performance on the same bill. But this concert film par excellence hopefully will serve another purpose: to allow these Kings of Comedy, all familiar presences on the tube, to reach beyond black audiences and let others know what they’ve been missing by not seeing these guys perform live.
Their humor is of course based on the African American experience, and these men tell it like it is--and how! Their audiences not only deserve honesty, but surely wouldn’t sit still for anything less. (Audiences at Harlem’s landmark Apollo Theater are famous for being as tough as they are enthusiastic.) The Kings use language that TV would never allow but is common in everyday life. Addressing hard-pressed, hard-working black people, they touch upon universal truths about joy and sorrow. Their audiences are not shy about expressing their exhilaration at their sense of recognition in everything these men comment upon in such inspired comic fashion. You recognize too the towering presence of such fearless predecessors as Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx and the one and only Jackie “Moms” Mabley.
The comics share bluntness and a capacity for finding humor in a wide range of circumstances, but their personalities are distinct. Harvey has the smoothness and the maturity--early middle age--to summon memories of popular music of his high school days 25 years ago for an inspired skewering of rap music. Hughley displays an awesome command of comic ammunition, fired in a dizzyingly rapid delivery. His speed also allows him to get away with just about anything, but his colleagues, in their own styles, are no less bold. Cedric the Entertainer offers a fluid drollness, and Bernie Mac has a strong masculine presence but can be as wide-eyed as Mantan Moreland of an earlier era, as he comments on the realities of 25 years of married life.
Not surprisingly, all four comedians find a rich source of humor in comparing the black man or woman with the white man or woman. (It is striking how often these men refer to their mothers and grandmothers--those matriarchal Big Mamas--but scarcely if ever to fathers and grandfathers.) We get a picture of ourselves as making too much of a fuss over trivial matters and of being slow to respond to danger. In short, we see how insulated most white people are to life’s harsher realities and injustices. Hughley tellingly comments on white people’s need to seek out sports for excitement. Black people, he explains, don’t need to go looking for excitement; just driving past a police station and hoping not to get stopped does the trick. Yet the show is distinguished by its lack of anger and bitterness. It’s not that these men don’t harbor such feelings, but rather it’s their particular genius to transform their life experiences into fodder for laughter. “The Original Kings of Comedy” ranks right up there with Pryor’s “Live on Sunset Strip,” Eddie Murphy’s “Raw” and Martin Lawrence’s “You So Crazy.”
* MPAA rating: R, for language and sex-related humor. Times guidelines: Language is strong; some references to sex are very blunt.
‘The Original Kings of Comedy’
Steve Harvey
D.L. Hughley
Cedric the Entertainer
Bernie Mac
A Paramount release of an MTV Films and Latham Entertainment presentation of a 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks production of a Spike Lee Joint. Director Spike Lee. Producers Walter Latham, David Gale, Spike Lee. Executive producer Van Toffler. Cinematographer Malik Sayeed. Editor Barry Alexander Brown. Executive music producer Alex Steyermark. Production designer Wynn P. Thomas. Running time: 1 hour, 56 minutes.
In general release.
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f0389d5b4bb938c2922f591761746752 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-18-me-6272-story.html | Civil Rights Protests at 1960 Convention | Civil Rights Protests at 1960 Convention
* Re “The Protesters of 1960 Helped Change the World,” Commentary, Aug. 13: At the 1960 Democratic convention, there was much disarray both among the various groups contending for the presidency and also a serious split among black leaders whether to endorse civil rights demonstrations. Leaders such as Adam Clayton Powell were strongly opposed to such an activity. And it was actually SNCC, CORE and other student groups that promoted and organized the protests. The pre-convention march was followed by a town hall-type meeting at the Shrine Auditorium, where all presidential candidates were invited to make a presentation. None mentioned the civil rights plank about which the picketers were demonstrating. Some of the speakers were booed. But it was Powell (not a candidate) who came on stage and, like the highly talented orator he was, brought the house to its feet. Bayard Rustin, who would later organize the March on Washington, recruited Michael Harrington to participate in drawing up a civil rights agenda. There was not a direct connection to the protesters.
The pickets, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, were there every day, all day. The Rev. Maurice Dawkins, a local preacher (shown in the photo), added a somewhat surreal aspect to the occasion. However, he is illustrative of the freewheeling nature that demon-strations of the ‘60s sometimes manifested.
F. DANIEL GRAY
Los Angeles
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3088555b1d61e3c64397cb700d1470f5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-24-mn-9483-story.html | Digging for Romans in China | Digging for Romans in China
Song Guorong’s genealogy gets hazy just a few generations before his own. But follow it back further--by 2,000 years--and he’ll tell you exactly who lies at the root of his family tree.
“I know my ancestors were Romans,” the lanky 39-year-old says in a matter-of-fact voice as he navigates the rutted lanes of this dusty hamlet deep in China’s interior.
It’s a remarkable claim to make, in a place as far east of Rome as New York is west.
But at its center lies a historical puzzle that has teased scholars and adventurers for decades: Did an ancient band of Roman legionnaires fight and work their way into China two millenniums ago, settling here on the edge of the Gobi Desert long before a man called Marco Polo ever set foot in old Cathay?
The village of Zhelaizhai, which may hold the key to the mystery, has so far refused to give away its secrets--such as who built its crumbling city wall centuries ago, where they came from, and why, even today, some residents of this remote area sport curly brown hair and light-colored eyes instead of the classic Chinese features of their curious neighbors.
But a cadre of history buffs and experts--armed with ancient documents, new discoveries, a dead man’s unpublished manuscript and a dash of romanticism--is out to prove the theory that Roman soldiers once made China their home before Jesus was born, despite skeptics who dismiss the idea as fantasy.
The stakes, proponents say, are high.
“If we can uncover the truth about this, we’ll have to rewrite world history, Roman history and Chinese history,” Guan Heng, whose father devoted the last 20 years of his life to trying to verify the Roman presence in China, declared with a fair amount of hyperbole.
Guan’s lofty ambitions are rooted in a mystery complete with epic battles, imperial pretensions, personal obsessions and colorful characters, all wrapped up in a tale even Marco Polo would have had trouble dreaming up.
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The improbable quest for Romans in China begins with an American with an improbable name: Homer Hasenpflug Dubs.
A noted China scholar at Oxford University, Dubs was the earliest academic to flesh out the possibility of “a Roman city in ancient China,” as he put it in a lecture before the China Society in London in 1955.
Dubs was intrigued by the mention of a city and county called Liqian in a government land register of AD 5, compiled at the height of the Han Dynasty.
At the time, Liqian (or Li-jien, in some transliterations) was also the ancient Chinese word for Rome or the Roman Empire--a name derived, perhaps, from Alexandria, then under Roman control and a place with which the Chinese had indirect contact.
Only two other Chinese cities on the official rolls, Kucha and Wen-siu, bore the names of foreign places. Both were given their names because immigrants from those foreign lands--ancient kingdoms in Central Asia--lived there.
If that was the case, Dubs thought, then why not Romans in Liqian? Because of the origins of the other cities’ names, “it should follow that people from the Roman Empire immigrated into China and founded this city,” he wrote in a monograph.
The problem was how such an event could have come about. Even with the opening of the Silk Road, the fabled trade route connecting East and West, Roman travelers could not have reached China without passing through the Parthian Empire (encompassing modern-day Iran and Iraq, and beyond), one of Rome’s sworn enemies.
Drawing on ancient texts, from Western classical poets to official Chinese court histories, Dubs proposed that the Romans of Liqian were legionnaires who had been swapped as prisoners of war or mercenaries from empire to empire until they finally wound up in China--more than 4,000 miles from home.
These Were ‘Very Tough Men’
The soldiers first set out in 53 BC under the command of Marcus Licinius Crassus, who ruled Rome along with Julius Caesar and Pompey. The Greek biographer Plutarch records that Crassus led 42,000 men on an abortive campaign against Parthia.
The Parthians mowed down their attackers with a hail of arrows, wiping out half of the Romans at the Battle of Carrhae, near the border of modern Turkey and Syria. Ten thousand Roman troops were taken prisoner, a portion of whom were moved to Central Asia to help Parthia guard its eastern frontier, according to the historian Pliny.
Pliny doesn’t mention how many of the legionnaires actually reached the East, a journey of more than 1,000 miles. But these were “very tough men,” Dubs wrote, seasoned veterans who made their living by fighting.
“Then they disappeared from Western history,” David Harris said.
Harris, an Australian writer, became enthralled by the long-lost city of Liqian in 1988, when he first came across Dubs’ work. To get to the bottom of the legend, he sold his belongings and moved to China as an English instructor at Lanzhou University in modern Gansu province, where Liqian was reputed to be located.
“I thought, it’s not another Yeti or another ‘Chariots of the Gods.’ This looks real,” he said from his current home near Adelaide. “There are a lot of mysteries out there, a lot of rubbish, and I didn’t want to get caught up in a wild goose chase. But this came from a very good source.”
Teaching classes by day and pursuing his real passion during his off hours, Harris eventually met Guan Heng’s father, Guan Yiquan, a Chinese-history professor whose own interest in Liqian had been piqued in the 1970s.
Both men believed, following Dubs’ speculation, that a number of the Roman soldiers somehow managed to escape Parthia and flee about 500 miles northeast to the land of the Huns, who were, like the Romans, enemies of Parthia. There, the theory goes, they hired themselves out as mercenaries to the mighty Hun leader Jzh-Jzh, whose vast empire stretched across the grasslands of Mongolia.
A restless conqueror, Jzh-Jzh had always cast a hungry eye on China to the south. But in 36 BC, the Chinese army decisively defeated Jzh-Jzh’s men at their encampment somewhere near today’s Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan.
An account of that battle, recorded in the ancient “Book of the Late Han Dynasty,” provides crucial evidence for Dubs’ hypothesis that Romans came to China via the Huns.
Defense Strategies Typical of the Romans
The account describes Jzh-Jzh’s citadel as being ringed by a double palisade of wood--a defensive barrier of stakes used only by Romans at the time.
Even more remarkable, more than 100 of Jzh-Jzh’s foot soldiers lined up outside the gates with their shields linked in a “fish-scale formation,” which Dubs identified as the testudo, a stratagem not found anywhere outside Rome.
“That’s an astounding piece of evidence,” Harris said. “Only the Romans linked their shields in the testudo formation. It’s a highly difficult maneuver. How do you explain it?”
For him, the case seems clear: The soldiers were the lost legionnaires, who, though they were far from their native land, still did as the Romans did: arranged themselves in their usual battle formation.
The victorious Chinese brought back 145 prisoners with them to China, as recorded in the “Book of the Late Han Dynasty.” These captives, Liqian buffs contend, were the Roman soldiers who had set out 17 years earlier to fight the Parthians.
Eager to make use of the POWs’ experience, the Chinese installed them as border guards in what has always been a strategically vital point in China’s northern frontier in modern Gansu province, Dubs postulated. This isolated outpost, which grew into a city and county, was then named Liqian in honor of the men who hailed from the West.
As a further bit of proof, official documents show that in AD 9, the city was briefly renamed by Emperor Wang Mang as Jie-lu, which means “prisoners taken in storming a city.”
Eventually, the Roman legionnaires intermarried with the local population, then finally died out--well before the first recorded diplomatic contact between the Roman and Chinese empires in AD 166, when an envoy dispatched by Emperor Marcus Aurelius arrived in the Chinese imperial capital of Luoyang.
The last mention of Liqian came in AD 746, when the city was overrun by Tibetans.
But one question remained: Exactly where was Liqian?
From his and Guan Yiquan’s calculations, Harris determined that all roads led to an area around Zhelaizhai, about a five-hour drive northwest of Lanzhou, the provincial capital.
In the spring of 1989, Harris and a group of other interested parties drove out to the area and stumbled across an ancient wall slightly west of the village. But the group was prevented from entering Zhelaizhai proper, where officials have since found further ruins--the tiny stretch of wall still visible today.
Both the remnants to the west and inside the village are rough stone structures consistent with Han Dynasty construction, evidence that a city existed in this area around the time Liqian was recorded in the imperial land register.
In Zhelaizhai, little is left of what originally stood. Local farmers have hacked away at the stone for personal use over the centuries.
Likewise, critics of the Liqian story have also emerged to hack away at a theory that Harris admits is still based on partial--if suggestive and tantalizing--evidence.
“We’re amassing a mound of circumstantial evidence, but there’s no clincher,” he said. “There’s no body we’ve dug up wearing Roman clothes and brandishing a sword.”
Skeptics point to the lack of almost any physical proof to back up the claims of Liqian fans.
But it hasn’t been for want of trying, supporters say. After Harris’ discovery of the wall at Zhelaizhai sparked a frenzy of publicity, an Australian team of scientists applied to the government for permission to take aerial photographs and satellite images to determine if ruins lay beneath the village.
They were turned down--partly because of the restrictive political atmosphere and suspicion toward foreigners that prevailed after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
Since then, interest has cooled among foreign researchers. Most Chinese scholars, too, have expressed little interest in the Liqian mystery.
Historian Liu Guanghua at Lanzhou University notes discrepancies in the dates when Liqian was supposedly established. Recent discoveries of Han Dynasty documents suggest that a city called Liqian was founded as early as 60 BC, two dozen years before any Roman legionnaires could have made it to China after the battle against Jzh-Jzh.
“Up to now, the theory’s supporters haven’t published anything to prove that their theory is well-grounded,” Liu said.
Guan Heng responds by pulling out and stacking 19 manuscripts on his living room table. Between their plastic yellow covers are photographs, maps and writings containing a total of 450,000 Chinese characters--the exhaustive survey his father was working on when he died in 1998, laying out all the historical evidence for Romans in Liqian. The final two chapters were left unfinished.
The younger Guan has so far failed to find a publisher willing to print a book of such limited appeal.
“This is my father’s contribution to the country,” he said angrily. “The government should publish it.”
Supporters of the Roman theory also counter the recently unearthed Han Dynasty records with fresh finds of their own from around Zhelaizhai: a Roman-style pot, a water bowl and, most intriguingly, a helmet inscribed with the Chinese words zhao an, or “one of the surrendered.”
“The evidence that critics have is not as much as what we have,” said Chen Zhengyi, who also teaches at Lanzhou University.
Some of the most compelling evidence, Chen said, can be found walking the dirt tracks around Zhelaizhai, a poor farming village of 70 families who live in clay-brick houses. The area is home to people like Wang Zhonghua, a teenager with curly brown hair and light-colored eyes, and Yan Qishou, who has reddish hair.
Then there’s Song Guorong, the man who is convinced of his heritage and who does boast some semi-European features.
To test such claims of a Western connection, a Beijing geneticist took blood and urine samples from 200 villagers last year and ran DNA tests. No results have been formally announced, but Guan said 40 of the test subjects showed some kind of genetic link with Europeans--perhaps not so surprising for an area along the old Silk Road, a point that enthusiasts concede.
For now, the case for a Roman city in ancient China remains largely circumstantial. Believers such as Harris acknowledge that a comprehensive argument will not be built in a day. Local officials, who have seized on Liqian as a tourist possibility--even erecting a Roman pavilion and statues of a Roman man and woman--say they would welcome an archeological excavation.
But best of all, perhaps, would be a source of confirmation hinted at in a now-lost footnote by a Dutch scholar named J. J. L. Duyvendak. According to the senior Guan shortly before he died, the Dutchman mentioned a set of eight terra-cotta plates, discovered in an imperial Chinese tomb, that depict scenes of the battle against Jzh-Jzh--and possibly of the soldiers who lined up in the strange fish-scale formation.
Rumors surfaced that the plates ended up in a private collection somewhere in the West, but the plates’ existence and whereabouts remain a mystery within a mystery.
Harris is undeterred. He wrote a book about his experiences in search of Liqian and is talking with an Australian production company about a documentary, which he hopes would inspire further research.
“I’m very confident in saying that . . . we’ve got a site that was Rome in China, and nobody’s proved me wrong,” he said. “Liqian remains elusive and a mystery, and every time you get close, it gets further away.
“I’m not disturbed by the time that we’re taking,” he added. “We’ve already waited 2,000 years.”
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e8909d4cb6ea76c6dd46d6d15a8bb185 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-28-ca-11405-story.html | NBC Leads Tally of Early Emmys, Boosted by ‘West Wing’ | NBC Leads Tally of Early Emmys, Boosted by ‘West Wing’
“The West Wing” began its Emmy campaign by collecting four statuettes Saturday during a preliminary nighttime Emmy Awards presentation in Pasadena, pacing NBC to the most trophies of any network.
The first-year White House drama claimed awards for casting, theme music, cinematography and art direction during Saturday’s event at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, which focused primarily on such technical areas, handing out awards in more than 50 categories. Another 27 Emmys for performers and programs will be presented Sept. 10 and televised on ABC.
NBC totaled 14 Emmys overall; Home Box Office--thanks in part to the biographical movie “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge,” starring Halle Berry, which also received four technical awards--followed with a dozen. ABC and Fox took nine each.
ABC’s roster of winners included both awards in the guest-acting field for its drama “The Practice,” with Emmys going to veteran actors James Whitmore and Beah Richards. On the comedy side, Bruce Willis garnered an Emmy for his guest stint on “Friends” (Tom Selleck was also nominated for the show); former “Designing Women” star Jean Smart was chosen for “Frasier.”
In programming categories, Fox’s “The Simpsons” was voted best animated program for sixth time in the last eight years, and the Discovery Channel’s “Walking With Dinosaurs” won for animated program longer than an hour--one of three awards earned by that production.
PBS’ “American Masters” was named outstanding nonfiction series, and HBO’s documentary “Children in War” won for nonfiction special. The pay channel’s “Goodnight Moon and Other Sleepytime Tales” and the Disney Channel’s “The Color of Friendship” shared honors as best prime-time children’s program.
HBO also tallied three Emmys for the movie “RKO 281,” about the making of “Citizen Kane,” and Fox’s “The X-Files” picked up a trio of awards for visual effects, makeup and sound mixing.
Nike won the award for outstanding commercial--still a relatively new category for the Emmys--with a spot titled “The Morning After.”
Here is the complete list of the creative arts Emmy Award winners announced Saturday night by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. They cover programs aired between June 1, 1999, and May 31, 2000.
Programs
* Classical music-dance program: “Dance in America: American Ballet Theatre in Le Corsaire” PBS.
* Children’s program: “The Color of Friendship,” Disney; “Goodnight Moon and Other Sleepytime Tales,” HBO.
* Nonfiction special: “Children in War,” HBO.
* Nonfiction series: “American Masters: Hitchcock, Selznick and the End of Hollywood,” PBS.
* Animated program (one hour or less): “The Simpsons,” Fox.
* Animated program (one hour or more): “Walking With Dinosaurs,” Discovery.
* Individual achievement in animation: Maciek Albrecht, production designer, HBO; Nelson Lowry, art director, Fox; Don Shank, art director, Cartoon Network; Bari Kumar, color stylist, Fox.
* Commercial: “The Morning After,” Nike Just Do It, Wieden & Kennedy.
Acting
* Guest actor, comedy series: Bruce Willis, “Friends,” NBC.
* Guest actor, drama series: James Whitmore, “The Practice,” ABC.
* Guest actress, comedy series: Jean Smart, “Frasier,” NBC.
* Guest actress, drama series: Beah Richards, “The Practice,” ABC.
* Voice-over performance: Julie Harris as Susan B. Anthony, “Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony,” PBS; Seth Macfarlane as Stewie Griffin, “Family Guy,” Fox.
Nonfiction Programming
* Cinematography: Didier Portal, Robert Pauly, “Raising the Mammoth,” Discovery Channel.
* Picture editing: Li Shin Yu, Nina Schulman, “New York, (The American Experience),” PBS.
* Sound editing: Andrew Sherriff, Simon Gotel, “Walking With Dinosaurs,” Discovery Channel.
Art Direction
* Art direction, multi-camera series: Dahl Delu, Rusty Lipscomb, “Love & Money,” CBS.
* Art direction, single-camera series: Jon Hutman, Tony Fanning, Ellen Totleben, “The West Wing,” NBC.
* Art direction, miniseries or movie or special: James Spencer, Leslie Thomas, Robert Greenfield, “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge,” HBO.
* Art direction, variety or music program: Bob Keene, Brian J. Stonestreet, “The 42nd Annual Grammy Awards,” CBS.
Cinematography
* Cinematography, multi-camera series: Dick Quinlan, “Spin City,” ABC; Peter Smokler, “Sports Night,” ABC.
* Cinematography, single-camera series: Thomas A. Del Ruth, “The West Wing (pilot),” NBC.
* Cinematography, miniseries or movie or special: Robbie Greenberg, “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge,” HBO.
Casting
* Casting, comedy series: Allison Jones, Coreen Mayrs, Jill Greenberg, “Freaks and Geeks,” NBC.
* Casting, drama series: Barbara Miller, John Levey, Kevin Scott, “The West Wing,” NBC.
* Casting, miniseries or movie or special: Lora Kennedy, Joyce Nettles, “RKO 281,” HBO.
Choreography
* Choreography: Rob Marshall, “Annie,” ABC.
Costuming
* Costuming, series: Giovanna Ottobre Melton, Sandy Kenyon, “Providence,” NBC.
* Costuming, miniseries, movie or special: Shelly Komarov, Lucinda Campbell, “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge,” HBO.
* Costume design, variety or music program: David Cardona, Bob Mackie, Helen Hiatt, “Cher: Live in Concert--From the MGM Grand in Las Vegas,” HBO.
Picture Editing
* Single-camera picture editing, series: Kevin Casey, “ER,” NBC.
* Single-camera picture editing, miniseries, movie or special: Carol Littleton, “Oprah Winfrey Presents: Tuesdays With Morrie,” ABC.
* Multi-camera picture editing, series: Ron Volk, Scott Maisano, “Frasier,” NBC.
* Multi-camera picture editing, miniseries, movie or special: Bill DeRonde, “A Supernatural Evening With Santana,” Fox.
Makeup
* Makeup, series: Cheri Montesanto Medcalf, Kevin Westmore, LaVerne Basham, Gregory Funk, Cindy Williams, “The X-Files,” Fox.
* Makeup, miniseries, movie or special: Annie Spears, Mark Coulier, Duncan Jarman, Diane Chernery-Wickens, Darren Phillips, “Arabian Nights (Part 2),” ABC.
Hairstyling
* Hairstyling, series: Bobby H. Grayson, “Saturday Night Live,” NBC.
* Hairstyling, miniseries, movie or special: Hazel Catmull, Kathrine Gordon, Katherine M. Rees, Jennifer Bell, Virginia Kerns, “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge,” HBO.
Other
* Lighting direction (electronic): Kim Killingsworth, John Alonzo, “Fail Safe,” CBS.
* Main title design: Tim Webber, “The 10th Kingdom,” NBC.
Music
* Music composition, series (dramatic underscore): Joseph LoDuca, “Xena: Warrior Princess,” syndicated.
* Music composition, miniseries, movie or special: John Altman, “RKO 281,” HBO.
* Music direction: Paul Bogaev, “Annie,” ABC.
* Music and lyrics: John Kimbrough, “Nickellennium,” Nickelodeon.
* Main title theme music: W.G. Snuffy Walden, “The West Wing,” NBC.
Sound Editing
* Sound editing, series: Walter Newman, Thomas A. Harris, Clay Collins, Darleen Stoker-Kageyama, Karyn Foster, Darren Wright, Kenneth D. Young, Rick Camara, Rick Hromadka, Allan Rosen, Casey Crabtree, Mike Crabtree, “Third Watch,” NBC.
* Sound editing, miniseries, movie or special: Michael Graham, Suzanne Angel, Anton Holden, Bill Bell, Bob Costanza, Gary Macheel, Lou Thomas, Tim Terusa, Mike Dickeson, Mike Lyle, Rick Crampton, Rick Steele, Rob Webber, Rusty Tinsley, David Bondelevitch, Tim Chilton, Jill Schachne, “The Hunley,” TNT.
Sound Mixing
* Sound mixing, comedy series or special: Paul M. Lewis, Nello Torri, Peter E. Kelsey, “Ally McBeal,” Fox.
* Sound mixing, variety or music series or special: Chris Lord-Alge, Guy Charbonneau, Don Worsham, Bob La Masney, “Cher: Live in Concert--From the MGM Grand in Las Vegas,” HBO; Edward J. Greene, Bob La Masney, Bobby Elder, “The Kennedy Center Honors,” CBS.
* Sound mixing, drama series: Steve Cantamessa, David J. West, Harry Andronis, Ray O’Reilly, “The X-Files,” Fox.
* Sound mixing, miniseries or movie or a special made for TV movie: Clive Derbyshire, Mark Taylor, Mike Dowson, “RKO 281,” HBO.
Visual Effects
* Special visual effects, series: Bill Millar, Deena Burkett, Monique Klauer, Don Greenberg, Jeff Zaman, Steve Scott, Steve Strassburger, Cory Strassburger, “The X-Files,” Fox.
* Special visual effects, miniseries or movie or special: Jez Harris, Mike McGee, Tim Greenwood, Mike Milne, Virgil Manning, Alec Knox, Carlos Rosas, Daren Horley, David Marsh, “Walking With Dinosaurs,” Discovery Channel.
Technical Direction
* Technical direction/camera/video, series: Donna Stock, Jim Verlarde, Michael J. Schwartz, Paul Johnson, Richard Davis, Terry W. Clark, Tom Luth, Rick Labgold, “Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher,” ABC; Steven Cimino, Carl Eckett, Jan Kasoff, John Pinto, Michael Bennett, Richard B. Fox, Frank Grisanti, Susan Noll, “Saturday Night Live,” NBC.
* Technical direction/camera/video, miniseries, movie or special: Gene Crowe, Ted Ashton, Dave Chameides, Rocky Danielson, Sam Drummy, David Eastwood, Tom “Scoop” Geren, Hank Geving, Larry Heider, David Irite, Dave Levisohn, Wayne Orr, Bill Philbin, Hector Ramirez, Dennis Turner, Easter Xua, John O’Brien, Chuck Reilly, “Fail Safe,” CBS.
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679ba2f7525644b405ea60fc11468b5d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-30-fi-12619-story.html | Motorola to Buy Printrak for $160 Million | Motorola to Buy Printrak for $160 Million
Electronics maker Motorola Inc. said Tuesday it agreed to acquire Printrak International Inc. for $160 million in cash, gaining a maker of software that will improve fire and police dispatching on Motorola’s two-way radios.
Motorola said it will pay $12.14 for each share of Printrak stock, up 3.3% from Printrak’s closing price Tuesday. But the offer represents a premium of about 35% over the stock price in the last two months.
Printrak, which is based in Anaheim, supplies software and related services for public safety and other customers. It logged sales of $109.9 million last year. Its computer programs help manage fingerprinting, photo storage and records.
Motorola, which is based in Schaumburg, Ill., is one of the biggest sellers of two-way radios for voice and data used by police, fire departments, ambulance teams and other public-safety agencies. Its sales totaled nearly $31 billion last year.
Printrak’s stock closed Tuesday at $11.75, up 13 cents a share, in Nasdaq trading. Motorola shares, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange, rose 25 cents to $35.75.
Motorola said it expects to complete the transaction in the fourth quarter.
Printrak, which has about 600 employees, including 310 in Orange County, would become a wholly owned subsidiary of Motorola and continue to operate from its Anaheim headquarters. No job cuts are planned, Motorola said.
Printrak was founded in 1974 as a unit of Rockwell International Corp., which sold it to London-based De La Rue Group in 1981. After years of losses, the unit was sold in 1991 to a Printrak management team that included current Chief Executive Richard M. Giles, who launched a corporate overhaul that put the company in the black.
The company went public five years later.
Although Printrak has been profitable, the company’s net income fell 29% to $1.2 million, or 9 cents a share, in the fiscal first quarter ended June 30, about half of what analysts had been expecting. The company attributed the decline to higher expenses for research and development, as well as a bump in administrative expenses from adding senior management. Net income for the last fiscal year also fell about 30%.
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Printrak Motorola Business: Fingerprint ID Electronics, systems, other Two-way radios software Cell-phones Headquarters Anaheim Schaumburg, Ill. Employees 600 130,000 OC employees 310 N.A. Chief executive Richard M. Giles Christopher B. Galvin Profits $7.9 million $817 million Annual Revenue $109 million $31 billion Stock price $11.75 $35.75 Market Nasdaq NYSE
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Sources: Bloomberg News, Printrak, Motorola
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2a0930a6ae4aee5cd88b4939b5d1d19d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-02-ca-60316-story.html | Bringing Puppets to Life . . . and Death | Bringing Puppets to Life . . . and Death
Drifting between the worlds of the living and the dead, ghosts are a perfect subject for puppetry or animation--and director Ping Chong uses both in his magical multimedia spectacle “Kwaidan: Three Japanese Ghost Stories,” which opened a five-performance run on Thursday in the Freud Playhouse at UCLA.
The 70-minute trilogy (no intermission) begins with a journey through a rural landscape derived from ancient scroll-paintings. It ends in contemporary Tokyo with a miracle under the golden arches of McDonald’s. A demon who eats human flesh shares the stage with teenagers in grotesque haircuts who order Quarter Pounders, but as long as the leading characters can tell them apart, and follow orders from the Other Side, happy endings are definitely possible.
Enlisting the talents of designer Mitsuru Ishii and puppet coordinator Jon Ludwig, “Kwaidan” features humanoid rod-puppets ranging in size from 12 inches total to those boasting 2-foot heads. But the biggest puppet on view is the set itself: a formal, black temple of wonders with sliding doors on several levels, circular apertures that sometimes become peepholes for enormous staring eyes, and three rectangular panels that can serve as isolated stages or combine in a vast panorama.
Projected images designed by Jan Hartley artfully compress space (taking us down into a darkening valley) and time (the Westernization of Japan), heightening the long wait that each of the major characters must endure to make his peace with the dead.
Adapted from a celebrated collection of stories by Lafcadio Hearn, the tales all dramatize the weight of the past upon the present. Juxtaposing a human actor with puppets of various sizes, “Miminashi-Hoichi” shows a talented musician nearly destroyed by the wrathful spirits of a long-lost war: a living artist endangered by his lifeless audience.
In “Jikininki,” a wandering priest must solve the mystery of a disappearing corpse and a hermitage that materializes as readily as its suffering, long-dead inhabitant. The answer involves the enduring legacy of evil. Finally, in “The Story of O-tei,” a lover’s promise proves stronger than death, radical changes in fashion or the transformation of the environment: another enduring legacy reincarnated.
Emphasizing cinematic fluidity, the production style encompasses tricks of scale (a tiny puppet replaced by a larger version, for example) to give theatrical equivalents of long shots and close-ups. Indeed, Chong twice provides dramatic overhead perspectives on the action, linking his characters and their environments.
In addition, a rich array of uncredited environmental sound effects and a wealth of ravishing nature images--butterflies fluttering in a garden, bats soaring across the moon, even a pesky fly--suggest a world teeming with life. And the frequent use of shadow puppets incorporates another kind of traditional Asian puppet idiom to keep the focus on the more dimensional leading characters.
Beyond its other impressive achievements, “Kwaidan” represents a comprehensive and inspiring statement about the artistic resources available when creating contemporary puppet theater for adults. UCLA finds the event “appropriate for ages 12 and up,” but individual parents should decide whether or not the violent plot points and otherworldly mood of the production will lead their children to fear finding monster eyes staring through their windows or a severed ear in their Chicken McNuggets.
Originally performed in 1998, “Kwaidan” was commissioned by the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta and brought to UCLA by a constellation of six arts institutions and sponsors. The puppeteers/actors on Thursday included David Ige, Pamella O’Connor, Lee Randall, Fred C. Riley III and Don Smith, with five others (including Chong) credited for recorded voices. Liz Lee designed the atmospheric lighting.
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* “Kwaidan” continues tonight at 8 and Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Freud Playhouse on the UCLA campus in Westwood. $9 (students)-$40. (310) 825-2101.
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aa1096cb1667c9c8f9311d091e270287 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-07-me-62381-story.html | * Liane Haid; Early Film Star in Austria, Germany | * Liane Haid; Early Film Star in Austria, Germany
Liane Haid, 105, Austria’s earliest film star who made the transition from silents to talkies. Born in Vienna on Aug. 16, 1895, she starred in 90 films--made at first in Vienna, but from 1922 onward increasingly in Berlin. She married Baron Fritz von Haymerle, an industrialist who founded her film company, Micco-Film. Turning down offers to act in the United States and Britain, Haid earned prominence in German-language films. Her first major movie was the silent “Lady Hamilton” in 1921, followed by “Lukrezia Borgia.” After 1929, she moved successfully into talking movies, among them “The Song is Ended.” In 1942, four years after Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, Haid fled to neutral Switzerland, her son Pierre Spycher-Haid said, “because of the regime, because everything was bombed and because all the good directors had left.” On Tuesday in Bern, Switzerland.
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c17599625df7c8716a1fe84975f68d77 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-08-ca-62742-story.html | NBC Cancels the Struggling Sitcom ‘Michael Richards Show’ | NBC Cancels the Struggling Sitcom ‘Michael Richards Show’
NBC has canceled “The Michael Richards Show,” a move that had been rumored for some weeks and which ends a high-profile failure for Richards, who was attempting a return to situation comedy after his beloved role as Kramer on “Seinfeld.”
From the beginning, the sitcom in which Richards played a private detective was beset by problems. The original pilot was thrown out, and sources say the show’s direction was repeatedly retooled and Richards would improvise on the fly, causing internal turmoil. Not long after the show’s launch in October, Spike Feresten, one of the sitcom’s executive producers, was let go, but the series continued to struggle at 8 p.m. Tuesdays.
For NBC, there were serious financial concerns with the sluggish ratings, given that the network had given Richards a 13-episode guarantee at what insiders put at about $1 million per episode. The show was produced jointly by Castle Rock Television and Warner Bros. Television.
The show’s last airing on NBC will be Jan. 2. On Jan. 9, NBC’s new Tuesday night lineup of sitcoms will feature “3rd Rock From the Sun” at 8, “Dag” at 8:30, “Frasier” at 9 and the new domestic comedy “Three Sisters” at 9:30.
“Dateline NBC” will continue to air at 10.
Richards was the first of the ex-"Seinfeld” core cast to attempt a return to series television since the benchmark sitcom went off the air in 1998.
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5ede9d5d6a13141ff433674cdb8a0337 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-08-mn-62966-story.html | Hong Kong Media Abuzz Over Rights | Hong Kong Media Abuzz Over Rights
Nowhere in Asia is the pulse of media freedom monitored with greater scrutiny or worry than in this rich and unique corner of China.
Two recent episodes have raised the level of concern.
The back-to-back and apparently unconnected incidents involved a very public tirade against the Hong Kong media by Chinese President Jiang Zemin in October, followed last month by the resignation of a prominent columnist. Willy Wo-lap Lam of the South China Morning Post, the territory’s largest English-language daily, quit amid claims that he was being muzzled.
Despite the initial controversy caused by the two events, human rights and pro-democracy activists and leading journalists here believe that media freedoms negotiated before China regained control over the territory in 1997 remain largely intact.
But they add that what happened only underscores the need to defend the city’s freedoms.
“These are bad incidents,” said Kin-ming Liu, general manager of Apple Daily, the city’s second-largest Chinese-language newspaper. “They don’t speak well for Hong Kong or for anyone involved, but they are not a shock to the process.”
Added Paul Harris, a spokesman for the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor: “They are significant indicators of underlying attitudes, but I don’t see a downward trend in press freedom right now. It’s one more reminder to stay vigilant.”
Indeed, the treatment in the Hong Kong media of Jiang’s Oct. 27 outburst seemed to confirm that the freewheeling nature of news coverage remains intact.
The Chinese president’s reaction to a Hong Kong reporter’s question about the future leadership of the territory quickly escalated from pique to anger to full-blown rage. Jiang’s contorted face was captured in full, unflattering detail in photos on the front pages of local papers.
Editorials defended the local media’s right to question political leaders and berated Jiang in what was described by veteran analysts as the first major personal attack on the Chinese leader by the media here since Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese control.
In an obvious fence-mending gesture three weeks later, Jiang made an unexpected schedule change at a gathering of Asia-Pacific leaders in Brunei to meet with the Hong Kong media. He took questions calmly and, before departing, asked if the reporters were satisfied.
The departure of journalist Willy Lam as a political columnist and China editor of the South China Morning Post is viewed by some analysts as more worrisome. For them, it raises a danger that is far more subtle and difficult to defend against: self-censorship.
The resignation of Lam, known for his scoops and aggressive reporting about the Chinese leadership, followed a scathing denunciation of his work in a letter to the editor written last summer by the Morning Post’s principal owner, Robert Kuok.
Kuok, a businessman who like many of the city’s influential figures has developed ties with China’s Communist leadership, accused Lam of “absolute exaggeration and fabrication” in a column that described a trip of 30 Hong Kong tycoons--including Kuok--to Beijing earlier this year.
Lam was relieved of his responsibilities as China editor. He subsequently resigned, citing intimidation and frequent efforts by Post editor Robert Keatley to tone down his work.
“It’s one sign of a self-censorship that’s getting worse by the day,” Lam stated. “It’s not a precipitous decline; it’s gradual, but it’s there.”
Keatley described the affair more as a management failure than an act of self-censorship. He defended his paper’s coverage of mainland China as robust, said there were plans to expand it and denied pulling any journalistic punches.
“I don’t feel constrained,” he said. “There’s no subject we can’t tackle.”
For now, at least, advocates of media freedom believe that damage to their cause has been limited. And one overriding factor gives them confidence for the immediate future: China’s political leaders know that freedom of expression and the rule of law provide the competitive edge that draws investment and, with it, new wealth to Hong Kong.
“There is a media-driven, investment-driven thrust for information here which are really just opposite sides of the same coin,” said Michael DeGolyer, who writes a political column for the Hong Kong iMail, an English-language tabloid. “That is hard to tamper with.”
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b1a85a307f7ffcb747660ebf9855a567 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-10-mn-63791-story.html | In Duval County, Views of Vote Process as Different as Black and White | In Duval County, Views of Vote Process as Different as Black and White
Terry Smith’s face scrunched up Saturday when he heard the news that the recounts had stopped.
“You’re lying, right?” he asked--twice--as he stared at the entrance of the Duval County Courthouse where the process was set to begin.
But when he saw county workers filing out and heard the thud, thud, thud of news crews slamming van doors, he got his answer.
“I feel cheated,” said Smith, a 33-year-old housekeeper. “I feel like I got left out.”
Smith spoke for many in Duval County, home to the third-biggest pile of undervotes in the state. Democrats have their hopes pinned on these undervotes--ballots with no presidential choice clearly marked--because they believe many here come from first-time African American voters.
Texas Gov. George W. Bush led Vice President Al Gore, 58% to 41%, in Duval County--but more than nine out of every 10 African Americans nationwide who voted chose Gore.
A Growing List of Complaints
The U.S. Supreme Court order stopping the recount was just the latest defeat in a long string of frustrations for voters here in Florida’s largest black-majority city.
The inescapable truth about Duval County is that--unlike the partisan lines that have framed the election dispute in other counties--the divide here over who won the presidential contest is focused on race.
Ever since the Nov. 7 election, blacks here have been cataloging complaints: confusing ballot directions and Jim Crow-era voting machines; delayed reports of undervotes after election day; an all-white, all-male, all-Republican canvassing board.
“We have been disrespected as a group,” said black state Rep. Anthony Hill. “We came out to vote for Al Gore, and our vote was supposed to be our equalizer. Now that has been taken away.
“Systematically,” he added.
Linda Nettles, a Bush supporter, says that’s ridiculous.
“They’re always complaining about equal rights when what they really want are special rights,” said Nettles, who is white, as she walked to the courthouse with a Bush sign attached to a dirt-streaked wood stake. “And I don’t understand why blacks vote in a bloc. White people don’t do that.”
Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.) is working with the Justice Department to investigate numerous complaints of voter discrimination. She’s also enlisted the support of the Black Caucus of the Florida Legislature, which has been pushing for election reform.
Last week, the outspoken, mince-no-words lawmaker filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Duval County canvassing board.
Brown now is calling for the board to name a black member to replace one of the four white men. Duval County is 28% black, with the “core” city of Jacksonville nearly 80% black.
“At least then they’ll have the appearance of credibility,” Brown said of the board. “You want to feel like you have somebody in the room.”
Blacks also are frustrated by Duval County’s state-high 21,942 overvotes--or double-punched ballots--that also were not counted. Nearly 42% of the county’s spoiled ballots--overvotes and undervotes--came from predominantly black areas, even though only 20% of the total votes were cast there. Black leaders blame the high inner-city illiteracy rate and a sample ballot thought to be confusing to first-time voters.
The evolution of Jacksonville has troubled many African American residents. The black-majority city merged with white-majority Duval County in 1968, diluting black political power just as many African Americans were first tasting it.
A Blistering Order From Washington
One reason why the canvassing board is all white is that blacks are outnumbered, 14 to five, on the city-county council and therefore have no say about which City Council member gets to rule on elections.
The two sides couldn’t have reflected sharper differences after the U.S. Supreme Court turned the election dispute on its head--again--Saturday afternoon with a blistering four-page rejection of the Florida Supreme Court’s plan to resume hand counting.
The news instantly dampened the spirits of many observers.
“What are we going to do now?” asked Shelia Andrews, a member of the local National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, who spent the day at the courthouse. “I don’t want the world to think we’re apathetic, but where are you going to turn when all there is here is a Republican administration? Who is going to help you?”
A few minutes later, the four canvassing board members left the courthouse looking relieved, even buoyed.
“I hope we don’t have to come back,” said Judge Brent Shore, the board’s chairman. “That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
The Supreme Court order to halt the counts capped a short but confusing day in the bowels of the Duval County Courthouse.
Starting at 9 a.m. EST, lawyers for the Democratic and Republican parties appeared in front of the board and began arguing about how to cull the 4,967 undervotes from the 264,720 total votes cast. They also unloaded boilerplate arguments about ballot standards, with the Democrats insisting that the board consider dimpled chads and the Republicans pressing for a more restrictive, two-prong rule. Duval County officials said they would resolve that later.
Meanwhile, the ballot counting machines arrived from Miami. On Friday, the Duval County board had ordered the machines flown up from Miami-Dade County, where officials two weeks ago had performed a similar cull. Despite GOP urgings that their use could result in a different number of undervotes, the canvassing board was all set to begin the separation process when the phone rang around 3 p.m.
Order to Stop Is Relayed
It was Shore’s wife. She was at home watching CNN. The Supreme Court said stop, she told him. The judge stopped.
“Stay means stay,” Shore told a crush of reporters who by that point had opened a campground on the courthouse lawn.
Democratic lawyer Ben Kuhne made one final plea to at least separate the ballots and get them ready to be counted if the Supreme Court rules that way Monday, when oral arguments are scheduled to be heard. The board said no.
An hour later the courthouse emptied, and many of the observers looked sullen.
“We had poured our hearts into getting out the vote,” said Betty Holzendorf, a Democratic state senator from Jacksonville. “This is going to make people lose faith that they can make a difference.”
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68f1e4a92fb31cd97bb3370d7546978a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-13-ca-64717-story.html | Disney Moves to ‘New Groove’ | Disney Moves to ‘New Groove’
Once upon a time in a far-off mountain kingdom that sort of resembled pre-Columbian South America, there lived an arrogant young emperor who sort of dressed like an Inca and took pleasure in making everyone’s life in the palace miserable.
As fate would have it, this royal brat angered his power-hungry court advisor, who used a magic potion to turn the emperor into a long-necked talking llama.
Such is the curious premise behind Disney’s new animated fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Groove,” a quirky, buddy-and-the-beast comedy that arrives Friday in theaters nationwide. Did we also mention that the emperor is so mean that he lies to his subjects, hurls insults at a bevy of prospective brides, and tosses an old man out of an upper-story window because he threw off the emperor’s style, or in the parlance of the movie, his “groove”?
Featuring the voices of comedian David Spade of the NBC sitcom “Just Shoot Me” as the sarcastic and insensitive emperor, Kuzco; actor John Goodman of “Roseanne” fame as the humble peasant Pacha; and singer Eartha Kitt as the evil advisor Yzma, the film can be viewed either as a refreshing departure from formulaic Disney fables of years past, or as a dramatic break that could leave loyal Disney fans scratching their heads. Either way, the film poses a unique marketing challenge for the studio.
With a price tag of around $80 million, the project has had a long and arduous history. Originally called “Kingdom of the Sun,” it was envisioned back in 1994 as an epic romantic drama with a “Prince and the Pauper” theme, complete with an ambitious song score written by Grammy winner Sting in collaboration with musician-composer David Hartley.
But by 1998 the filmmakers realized the project was misfiring. The decision was made to retool the story. Instead of a romantic drama with a grand musical score, it became a comic buddy adventure. The old songs were jettisoned, and Sting agreed to write two new ones--"Perfect World” and “My Funny Friend and Me.”
Such a process is a costly one, particularly in animation, where storyboarding is a crucial part of the creative process. But Thomas Schumacher, president of Disney Feature Animation, who has supervised such big Disney animated films as “Pocahontas” and “Tarzan,” said it isn’t unusual for films to go through the drastic make-over that befell “The Emperor’s New Groove.”
“A movie begins to emerge as you are making it,” Schumacher explained. “It’s a lot like writing a novel or a play. It takes shape over a long period of time.”
Producer Randy Fullmer gave one example of how the original story failed to jell.
“We wanted to set it in the 1400s before the Spanish came [to South America],” Fullmer recalled. “The Spanish brought the wheel, but we had to have a cart on the storyboard. We debated for three hours whether to have a wheel on the cart. At the end of the day, it hit several of us. We are really on the wrong track. We are not trying to make a documentary on the Incas. We are just trying to have fun.”
As a result, the movie retains its pre-Columbian flavor but avoids pinpointing an exact culture or people such as the Incas (despite the similarity of the main character’s name to that of the Incan capital of Cuzco).
Viewed from one perspective, “The Emperor’s New Groove” is an attempt by Disney to think “out of the box” with humor and style that is more contemporary than the studio’s traditional offerings. The success of hipper family fare such as Universal’s “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas” could bode well for the studio.
But with a puzzling title, an unfamiliar story line, a vague sense of locale, an unlikable lead character and an arch-villainess who can’t begin to compare with the frightening, apple-bearing witch in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the question becomes whether Disney is too far off its usual animated groove.
For instance, in “Mulan,” Eddie Murphy’s dragon character served as comic relief with his physical humor as well as smart-alecky dialogue. In “The Emperor’s New Groove,” everybody is comic relief. Indeed, the frenetic pace and wild-eyed humor is so un-Disney at times that some who’ve seen advance screenings joke that it must have been conceived as a Looney Tunes cartoon at Warner Bros.
Directed by Mark Dindal (“Cats Don’t Dance”), the film is spiced with wisecracking dialogue supplied by screenwriter David Reynolds, one of the original gag writers on Conan O’Brien’s NBC talk show.
Dindal and producer Fullmer (artistic coordinator on “The Lion King”) denied that Disney deliberately fuzzed up the movie’s locale or whether the characters were Incas to avoid comparisons to DreamWorks’ 1999 animated adventure “The Road to El Dorado,” which had a villain based on Spanish explorer Cortes; the film was a critical and commercial disappointment.
“This version was well in the works when that movie came out,” Dindal said. “Early on, when our movie got to be very comic, all of us felt that you can’t be making this farce about a specific group of people unless we are going to poke fun at ourselves. This didn’t seem to be a proper choice about Incas or any group of people. It was more of a fable.”
A bigger hurdle was deciding how far to take the emperor’s snotty behavior and wisecracking humor.
Dindal said they were encouraged by Disney’s top brass, including corporate Chairman and Chief Executive Michael Eisner, Vice Chairman Roy Disney and studio chief Peter Schneider, to “think outside the box.”
From a comedy standpoint, Fullmer added, the humor often “went down the path with David Spade.”
“We wanted someone who comes across as a little bit obnoxious, and, let’s face it, David Spade has sort of that quality,” Fullmer said. “His whole comic routine is somewhat edgy and somewhat badly behaved.” However, Fullmer noted, “At times, we were pushing it too far and pulled it back. We didn’t want to make [Kuzco] so edgy that audiences say, ‘We don’t like the character and don’t care if he ever gets better.’
“It is a bit of a departure to have the main character as spoiled and cantankerous as he is in the beginning, but, in my mind, he displays characteristics that we see on the planet today,” the producer explained. “What I think is rewarding is that little kids tune in to the fact that that kind of behavior doesn’t work for him.
“I think Mark and I felt very strongly that a movie, when you are working at the Disney Co., ought to have a good character, a good personality. People ought to leave the theater and learn something. A movie should have a moral point of view. I am always happy if kids learn some type of lesson--a good, positive lesson.”
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Although the humor may be a step forward for Disney in “The Emperor’s New Groove,” the look of the film is a step back, in a way. Its angular shapes are along the lines of “Hercules.” One of the major inspirations for the filmmakers was the simplistic style of the classic Disney films of the 1950s, particularly “Peter Pan” and “Lady and the Tramp.”
“You don’t want to introduce deep-focus and visual complexity when comedy is your focus,” Fullmer said. “Clearly, we have a candy store [at Disney] of technical things at our disposal. . . . But our feeling was that a lot of films get cluttered visually. There is so much going on on the screen that you miss what is going on with the characters.”
Now the question is, can Disney sell this movie?
Unlike the buildup the studio gave this summer to its expensive, computer-animated prehistoric adventure “Dinosaur” and the recent marketing muscle the studio put behind “102 Dalmatians” at Thanksgiving, the release of “The Emperor’s New Groove” seems relatively restrained. To begin with, the billboards for the film convey odd messages such as “Llama llama ding dong” and “Nuttier than a holiday fruitcake.”
Disney now has a heavy television advertising campaign underway, as well as print advertising and sneak previews around the country. But audiences will not be able to run out to their local Disney store and grab up llama dolls and emperor figurines. Those shelves are already crammed with puppies from “102 Dalmatians.” (McDonald’s, however, will be offering “Groove” merchandise.)
As for the title, Dindal only vaguely recalls it originated somewhere in Disney marketing, but he is certain of one thing--when kids were asked if they knew what was meant by the word “groove,” they understood perfectly.
“There was this controversy about using this word in the title,” Dindal recalled. “We had some focus groups that had children 6 to 8 years old in them. They were asked that question and they said, ‘You know, the way he lives his life!’ . . . Children had no problem defining what that meant. The funny thing was, they said it so matter of fact: ‘Who doesn’t understand that?’ ”
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d4af3f579f3c41a7870e3f4074ad29b5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-13-fi-64817-story.html | Microsoft to Pay $97 Million to End Temp Worker Suit | Microsoft to Pay $97 Million to End Temp Worker Suit
Microsoft Corp. will pay $97 million to settle a federal lawsuit from employees who claimed the software giant classified them as “temporary” workers for years to deny them standard benefits such as health insurance and the lucrative employee stock purchase plan, thereby saving the company millions.
Under the agreement announced Tuesday, between 8,000 and 12,000 people are eligible for a share of the settlement. The amount each worker will receive depends on when he or she worked, how long he or she worked and the total number of people who file claims under the settlement.
Microsoft has more than 40,000 employees; about 5,000 of them are so-called contingency workers. The settlement is unlikely to adversely affect the bottom line for Microsoft, which reported a $9.4-billion profit last year.
The issue has wide-ranging implications for the nation. The Labor Department estimates that more than 10 million Americans are temporary or contract workers.
Marcus R. Courtney, who co-founded the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, a labor organizers group based in Seattle, argues that the battle is just beginning.
Many companies continue to use temporary employees on what is essentially a permanent basis to deny them benefits, he said.
“This ends the permatemp scam at Microsoft,” he said. “It does not end the problem with contract work in this industry.”
Courtney, who was a temporary employee at Microsoft for two years, said people often take such jobs because they have no other options. “This is not going to go away,” he said. “We are dealing with the issue of equal compensation for equal work, and ultimately that issue will have to be addressed.”
The case initially began with two lawsuits dating back to 1992, which charged that Microsoft offered prospective employees temporary work that was identical to the work performed by “blue badge” employees with permanent positions.
The only functional difference between the two classes was that one group did not receive benefits. Although some employees preferred temporary employment, many said they stayed in such jobs for years--in a few cases, for more than a decade--in hopes of winning a permanent job.
As the legal battle wore on, Microsoft changed its policies for using temporary workers. First, it developed guidelines to help managers figure out when a job shouldn’t be given to a temporary employee. Then, Microsoft set up policies favoring temp agencies that offer better benefits to the temporary workers they handle.
Last February, the company instituted a policy prohibiting temporary employees from working more than 12 months at a stretch without taking at least a 100-day break.
“That has nothing to do with this case,” said Matt Pilla, a Microsoft spokesman. “We’ve implemented these changes to ensure that temporary workers were just that, not to avoid lawsuits.”
But Stephen K. Strong, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, disagreed. “The first thing Microsoft had to do to settle this case is end the permatemp policy,” said Strong, a partner in the Seattle law firm of Bendich, Stobaugh & Strong. “The timing makes it quite evident that that’s exactly why they did this.”
The changes in Microsoft’s policies, Strong said, have achieved the plaintiffs’ objectives: Over the last fiscal year, the company issued blue badges to 3,000 temporary employees. “It seems like a big improvement. They still have temporary employees there, but they’re more in the nature of real temps,” Strong said. His law firm is seeking 28% of the settlement amount, or $27.1 million.
The settlement came after the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that employers must make the same retirement benefits available to everyone. Anyone who worked for Microsoft for at least five months a year is entitled to money they would have received if they had been able to purchase the company’s stock at a discount, as full-time employees are.
The agreement still must be finalized, but preliminary approval came Tuesday from Judge John Coughenour of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. No one knows when the money will be distributed.
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4bffa512831e7c6274d06c77729cb740 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-14-ca-65223-story.html | MORNING REPORT | MORNING REPORT
ART
New Rembrandt Record: A 17th century portrait by Rembrandt set a new record price for the Dutch master Wednesday, selling for $28.69 million at a London Christie’s auction. “Portrait of a Lady” was part of the collection of the late Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild that was being offered in a two-day sale. The price was more than three times the $8.7 million fetched by Rembrandt’s “Portrait of a Girl” in 1986, the previous record for the artist’s work.
ENTERTAINMENT
Fox Moves: Another of TV’s new high-profile star vehicles has hit a red light, with Fox canceling John Goodman’s “Normal, Ohio.” Meanwhile, the network will premiere two new series on Jan. 10. “Grounded for Life,” a family comedy from Carsey-Werner Productions (“Roseanne,” “That ‘70s Show”), will air in Goodman’s Wednesday 8:30 p.m. time slot, followed at 9 p.m. (replacing the canceled “The $treet”) by the reality program “Temptation Island.” The latter six-episode series will follow four couples whose commitment is challenged when they are matched up with others on a Caribbean island. Also starting Jan. 10, a second weekly edition of “That ‘70s Show” will run Wednesdays at 8 p.m.
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Post-Election Boost: The drawn-out Florida election battles may not have been good for the country, but they have paid off for the network newscasts. “NBC Nightly News,” ABC’s “World News Tonight” and “CBS Evening News” have seen their combined viewership climb by an average of 4 million more nightly viewers since the October election. That’s good news for respective anchors Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather, whose shows have been in a longtime ratings decline due to lifestyle changes and the proliferation of cable news.
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Olsen Empire Expands: The ubiquitous Olsen twins are returning to series television, with Fox Family Channel having ordered 26 episodes of a new Mary-Kate and Ashley live-action comedy to debut this summer. The teens will produce and star in the as-yet-untitled series, which is expected to air as part of the cable network’s Saturday daytime schedule.
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Awards Roundup: Gil Cates has signed for his 10th turn as Oscar producer of the March 25 Academy Awards. . . . A total of 179 feature films, 41 foreign-language films, 110 TV series and 77 miniseries or TV movies have qualified for consideration for the Jan. 21 Golden Globes. Nominations will be announced Dec. 21. . . . The 53rd annual Prime-Time Emmy Awards will be held Sept. 16, with nominations due July 12. . . . Director Ridley Scott (“Gladiator”) will receive this year’s director’s achievement award Jan. 13 during the 12th annual Nortel Networks Palm Springs International Film Festival. Other festival honorees will include Nicolas Cage (Charles A. Crain Desert Palm Award for acting) and composer Randy Newman (Frederick Loewe Award for achievement in film scoring). . . . Time magazine has named Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (opening here Friday) as the year’s best movie. . . . Lifetime CEO Carole Black will receive the New York Women in Film & Television’s Muse Award for Outstanding Vision & Achievement tonight. Previous recipients include Meryl Streep, Penny Marshall and Barbara Walters. . . . The Hollywood Women’s Press Club has given its annual “sour apple” award to radio-television host Laura Schlessinger.
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af9e95eda3a1e1cc3813f85176c633f5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-15-cl-1351-story.html | Lighthouse Blazes a Trail Into the Future | Lighthouse Blazes a Trail Into the Future
When 6th century monks braved lashing Atlantic waves and scaled the threatening spikes of Skellig island, their mission was to feel the power of God.
Now the rocky outcrop off the southwestern coast of Ireland is hoping to benefit from another force. Home to one of oldest lighthouses in Ireland, Skellig is set to blaze a trail to the future by harnessing solar power to fuel its ancient beam.
The southwest of Ireland, as the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit the peninsula via the 110-mile Ring of Kerry well know, is not exactly famous for baking hot sun. But the Commissioners for Irish Lights, the body in charge of Ireland’s 80 or so sea lanterns, said this is no problem.
“There is enough sun anywhere in the world for solar panels; it doesn’t matter about the rain,” commissioner Rory McGee said. “You could put solar panels on the North Pole if you wanted to and they would still work--if there were enough of them.”
The keeper of its lighthouse, Richard Foran, 52, is charmed by the idea that this site, already steeped in a great history of innovation, is to be home to yet another inspired engineering feat.
“It is one of the most remarkable places,” he said in an interview. “People have done remarkable things there.”
First settled in the 6th century, Skellig is one of the most remote monastic sites in Christendom. Visitors can still see the beehive-shaped stone huts built there by monks who lived on the island for 600 years before the unforgiving gales and bitter cold drove them back to the mainland.
“The monks’ achievement was incredible,” Foran said. They had no fresh water so they carved channels into the rock so the rain water would flow into wells that they had dug themselves.”
The most awe-inspiring of the monks’ constructions were the three vast flights of stone steps up to the monastery, perched on the lower of Skellig’s two rocky peaks, 600 feet up.
The monks hauled vast slabs of stone up almost vertical slopes and carved and chipped and chiseled into the rock to build a route to their sanctuary of devotion.
Some 1,300 years after the monks landed on Skellig and seven centuries after its unforgiving weather drove them away, man again chose the island as the site of an engineering miracle.
“In 1800, the Knight of Kerry wrote to the county sheriff requesting that a lighthouse be built on Skellig because there had been several wrecks and disasters at sea,” Foran said.
Twenty years later, fires were again blazing in the monks’ huts as workers and their families moved to the island to begin the six-year job of building the lighthouse. Since 1826 it has been a vital warning to ships and planes to steer clear of the rocks of Skellig.
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14c6ddad451574a45b3ff2e57e61edb2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-16-mn-754-story.html | Disney Seeks New ‘Groove’ With Dual-Language Release | Disney Seeks New ‘Groove’ With Dual-Language Release
How to target Latino moviegoers--or whether to even bother--has long confounded Hollywood.
Walt Disney Pictures this weekend is taking that question more seriously with side-by-side English and dubbed Spanish releases of its new animated movie “The Emperor’s New Groove” in 16 multiplexes across the Southland.
For years, Disney and other studios have offered dubbed or subtitled prints of their movies to select theaters that requested them in heavily Latino markets around the country. But the bilingual release in major theater complexes--and the promotional effort to draw Spanish-speaking audiences--represents a newfound resolve to tap this elusive audience.
Nearly half of the prime moviegoing audience in Los Angeles is Latino, according to a recent Nielsen study, drawn to the same English-language hits as the general population.
But the Disney experiment could broaden that base, attracting Spanish-dominant parents and their small children, who tend to speak Spanish in the home even if they are U.S.-born.
The other studios are watching the experiment with deep skepticism. While they acknowledge that Latinos are the fastest-growing moviegoing ethnic group in the country, they are skeptical that there is a separate and viable Spanish-language business.
“If there’s a growing non-English-speaking audience in L.A., we certainly don’t want to leave that audience out,” said Nikki Rocco, head of domestic distribution for Universal Pictures. “But we have found, as a general rule, that most kids today speak English.”
No one really knows how audiences will respond. There has never been a concerted effort to study the moviegoing habits of Latinos. The demographics of Southern California clearly show plenty of Spanish speakers, but it remains to be seen whether that translates into an audience with enough box office muscle to justify a major commitment by Hollywood studios.
Disney chose to test the market with “Emperor” in part because of its pre-Columbian theme and Latin American flavor. The movie is a tale of a self-absorbed young emperor in ancient Peru who is turned into a whiny llama by a conniving woman, and his plot to regain the throne.
“Obviously, there’s a tremendous population not being served in Spanish,” said Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group Chairman Richard Cook. “We think it’ll turn out to be bigger than any of us [anticipated].”
Cook said Disney will spend about $250,000 to promote the Spanish-language release in newspapers, radio and television with a targeted campaign. While Disney has never put any real effort into Spanish-language advertising before, the expenditure is a tiny fraction of what studios routinely spend on English-language marketing.
Many of the studios have discovered that marketing, advertising and promoting their movies in Spanish--with culturally relevant creative campaigns--is crucial. But the studios have found that Spanish-language versions of the movies are not. The audience is increasingly assimilated and bilingual.
Latino purchasing power nationwide is expected to top $452 billion next year, and a wide range of industries are eager to cash in. But a vitriolic debate has raged among marketers, advertising agencies and broadcasters over how important Spanish is to those efforts.
Santiago Pozo, president of the Arenas Group, a movie marketing firm that specializes in reaching Latinos, said that when it comes to Hollywood, Spanish promotions are key, but Spanish prints are not.
“Dubbed prints do not necessarily increase the total box office of the picture,” said Pozo, whose clients have included Universal Pictures, DreamWorks SKG and Warner Bros. “What increases the total box office is to address the Latino market with a full-blown [creative] campaign in TV, print and radio. Translations don’t work.”
Most recently, Pozo led creative efforts in Spanish for Universal’s smash hit, “Dr. Seuss’ the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.” American-born audiences had to be swayed to see a film whose story was familiar, whereas many Latino moviegoers had to be introduced to the children’s classic for the first time. A Spanish campaign did that, but its aim was to draw audiences to the English release, even though select theaters received subtitled copies.
By Pozo’s account, it worked: About a fifth of “Grinch” audiences have been Latino.
Pozo has worked with Universal on dual-language campaigns as far back as the mid-1980s, for such films as Steven Spielberg’s animated “An American Tail.” He said no new audience was tapped. Rather, the audiences came as long as the movies were shown in heavily Latino neighborhoods and were promoted in both languages.
“You have two theaters in La Puente. Are you splitting your gross, or are you getting into a new market?” he asked.
Hollywood has made spotty attempts for decades to cater to Spanish-speaking moviegoers, with largely poor results.
In 1997, for example, Warner Bros. paired a Spanish subtitled print of “Selena"--the story of the slain Tejano superstar--alongside the English-language version in 17 theaters across the country--including 12 in the Los Angeles area.
The subtitled prints grossed only about 25% of their English counterparts in the same multiplexes, according to Warner Bros. distribution chief Dan Fellman.
Subtitles generally do not play well with mainstream audiences of any ethnicity. Furthermore, Warner Bros. learned that young Selena fans were largely acculturated English-speakers and preferred the non-subtitled version.
In fact, several studio executives said, the largest moviegoing audience overall is ages 12 to 24, and the Latinos among that group are watching English movies.
DreamWorks, like other studios, has released family movies dubbed in Spanish simultaneously with their national release, including its 1999 animated feature “The Road to El Dorado.”
“We came to the conclusion that in specific theaters it was worth doing two versions,” said DreamWorks distribution head Jim Tharp. “We found it successful enough that we would continue to do it when the exhibitors request it.”
Tharp said that when he was a film buyer for General Cinema a decade ago, that circuit tried a similar experiment in one Hialeah, Fla., theater and found the Spanish print grossed a quarter of the English counterpart’s take.
“The research we found was that parents did not want their kids going to the Spanish-language version. They wanted to expose them to English” so they would learn the language, he said.
For Disney, the experiment is a first and comes at little cost. Disney already dubs its animated features for international markets. The demographics Disney targets--families with small children--may be the Spanish-language niche that has eluded other efforts.
“The children of immigrants, even if ultimately they will be bilingual or English-dominant, tend to be Spanish-dominant before they start to go to school at age 5,” said Carl Kravitz, president of cruz/kravetz: Ideas, a Los Angeles Latino advertising agency. “A vast number of families in the Southern California marketplace are going to do better sharing the experience in Spanish than in English.”
The chains that agreed to participate--including AMC, Edwards, Pacific and Mann in cities such as Ontario, Orange, Covina, Commerce, Burbank and Van Nuys--did so with trepidation, according to a source close to the deal. They will yank the Spanish-language prints after 10 days if they fail to attract substantial audiences.
Hollywood is closely watching Disney’s test. If it succeeds, it could tap a fresh audience base when overall moviegoing attendance is slightly down and has been relatively flat for many years.
Rod Rodriguez, senior vice president of distribution at Disney, said a strong showing may convince the studio to follow the strategy in major Latino markets across the country with next year’s animated “Atlantis” and “Monsters, Inc.”
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12191953e5b2191d51d31f7222c94ed5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-17-me-1254-story.html?_amp=true | McMartin Defendant Who ‘Lost Everything’ in Abuse Case Dies at 74 | McMartin Defendant Who ‘Lost Everything’ in Abuse Case Dies at 74
When it was over, Peggy McMartin Buckey spoke bitterly of the price she had paid in the longest and costliest trial in American history--one which, from a legal standpoint, she had won.
“I’ve gone through hell and now we’ve lost everything,” she said in 1990 after she and her son, Ray Buckey, were acquitted of child molestation charges in a case that had opened the door on one of society’s deepest taboos.
Buckey, who was 74, was pronounced dead Friday at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Torrance after paramedics found her unconscious in the nearby home where she had lived before and after the three-year trial. The cause of death was not immediately available.
Buckey had been a driving force behind the McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach, which became the focus of a fast-spreading investigation into alleged child molestation in the fall of 1983.
The school had been founded by her mother, Virginia McMartin, a feisty, plain-spoken woman who died in 1995. But it was Buckey--a quieter, more overtly spiritual woman--who hired her son to work at the school and who carried out much of the administrative oversight.
Peggy McMartin Buckey, Ray Buckey and Virginia McMartin were among six people indicted in 1984 on 115 counts of child molestation. Ultimately, after ballooning to 208 counts involving 41 children, the case was whittled down to 65 counts of molestation and conspiracy against Buckey and her son.
Nothing about the McMartin case was simple, easy or fast. It cost taxpayers more than $13 million. The preliminary hearing alone took 18 months. The entire case took seven years to wind through the courts, and involved six judges, 17 attorneys and hundreds of witnesses, including nine of the 11 children alleged to have been molested.
The case made and ruined careers, and changed the way police departments, day care centers, schools and courts deal with child molestation charges. It was made into a TV movie--and no wonder. With its allegations of animal sacrifice, pornography and satanic-type rituals, it led not a few observers to compare it to the Salem witch trials.
Of all the figures in the case, including McMartin and Raymond Buckey, it was Peggy McMartin Buckey who lost the most, said Ray Buckey’s attorney, Danny Davis.
“Peggy was spiritual, and she never seemed concerned specifically about what would happen if they were convicted,” Davis said Saturday. “But she lost everything. . . . Now that she has passed away, [I] would say, that’s one we should be ashamed of.”
Buckey had derived much of her self-esteem and identity from her job as a teacher and administrator, Davis said. When that was stripped from her, she never fully recovered, he said.
Buckey appeared cheerful and friendly during the trial, and passed the long hours crocheting, drawing pictures and reading religious literature. But she reacted indignantly during 11 days on the witness stand when she was asked about claims that she and her son had molested and threatened children.
“Never!” she said repeatedly.
She did testify that she had been molested as a child, but she was not asked to describe the circumstances under which it occurred. She also testified that her son had been a troubled young man who was “trying to find himself” before and during the three years he worked at the preschool, and that he felt more accepted by children than by adults.
After the trial ended, Ray Buckey was retried on eight counts on which the first jury had deadlocked, but a mistrial was declared when the second jury also deadlocked.
A number of jurors in both trials said they believed that children had been molested, but that the prosecution had failed to prove that the Buckeys were the ones who had molested them.
Some said the children appeared to have been led by questioners to claim they had been molested. Others said that so much time had passed that the memories of the children--who passed from toddlerhood to adolescence in the course of the legal proceedings--couldn’t be trusted.
The Buckeys, McMartin and Peggy Buckey’s daughter, Peggy Ann Buckey, successfully sued the parent of one child at the school for slander in 1991, but they were awarded only $1 in damages.
Survivors include Buckey’s husband, Charles Buckey; Ray Buckey, who went to law school after the trial; and Peggy Ann Buckey, who resumed her teaching career.
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4a7900de5aeaabb8524c78cdbaf975d0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-18-ca-1437-story.html | Fans Give Mel Gibson Just What He Wants | Fans Give Mel Gibson Just What He Wants
Holiday business heated up early over the weekend as comedy ruled the box office: Adults in huge numbers wanted to see Mel Gibson divine “What Women Want”; teenagers flocked to “Dude, Where’s My Car?”; and families still preferred “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” over the arrival of the Disney-animated comedy “The Emperor’s New Groove.”
“What Women Want” got off to the best start ever for a movie released in December, an estimated $34.4 million on 3,012 screens, enormous for a pre-Christmas weekend and a good portent since the core female audience is not readily available until Christmas Day. If the estimate holds, it will be a personal best for Gibson, slightly edging out “Ransom” and “Lethal Weapon 4.”
The film’s premiere was well above what Paramount Pictures expected, and according to studio senior executive Rob Friedman, the audience was 60% female, and most of them were older. But unlike most over-25 female-skewing comedies, satisfaction levels were just as strong with the 40% or so younger viewers in attendance, both male and female. “Women’s” only comedic competitor for the holidays will be the Sandra Bullock film “Miss Congeniality.”
“Dude, Where’s My Car?” proved to be a savvy counter-programming stocking stuffer from 20th Century Fox aimed at the youth market. The goofy teen comedy rode to an estimated $14-million opening weekend on 2,087 screens, and even if it were to fall apart, it’s already grossed more than it cost ($13 million). According to the studio, exit surveys indicated that younger teens especially enjoyed it, and they’re just getting out of school for the holiday recess.
“The Emperor’s New Groove” was slightly offbeat, with a premiere of about $10 million on 2,801 screens. Hipper than the usual Disney animated fare, the film, which lacks the usual promotional tie-ins to build awareness, is depending on word of mouth to break out during the holidays. Disney distribution executive Chuck Viane is basing this assessment on good reviews and strong exit polling. Like the live-action “102 Dalmatians,” “Groove” was unable to overcome the enormous popularity of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
After five weeks, Jim Carrey’s “Grinch” is still master of its domain. The expected $13 million the film collected this weekend vaulted it to almost $213 million. In the next few days “Grinch” will surpass “M:I-2" as the year’s highest-grossing film.
The standout limited release “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” roared into eight Los Angeles theaters Friday and picked up the L.A. Film Critics Award for best film (and three other honors) on Saturday. Ang Lee’s martial arts fable was able to break into the top 12 on just 31 screens with $1.1 million expected--an unheard-of $35,675 per theater for a subtitled movie. Moreover, says Sony Pictures Classics’ principal Michael Barker, it’s playing almost as strongly in mainstream theaters such as New York’s 42nd Street and locally, out in Winnetka, as in traditional urban specialty houses. After only 10 days (it opened a week earlier in New York), “Tiger” has $2.2 million in its tank and will broaden to almost 200 theaters by Christmas.
Attendance is beginning to rival the stock market in volatility, with the two major new arrivals knocking many of the top 10 films for a loop.
The mountain-climbing adventure “Vertical Limit,” which got off to a successful start last weekend, lost a bit of its footing, with grosses dropping 42% in weekend two, down to about $9 million. It’s grossed almost $29 million in 10 days. The Christmas week surge in attendance, which starts next Monday, should help “Limit” hang on somewhat. Then again, there are five national releases due, beginning Friday with “Cast Away,” “The Family Man,” “Miss Congeniality” and “Dracula 2000,” and, on Dec. 25, “All the Pretty Horses.”
An indication of how punishing audience indifference can be was found in “Dungeons and Dragons,” which completely fell apart in its second weekend, dropping almost 70% to $2.2 million. Its 10-day total is just under $11 million.
“Proof of Life,” already on the critical list after its disappointing first weekend, dropped a sharp 49% to an estimated $5.2 million, proof that the hostage drama may soon be on life support. Its 10-day total is an underwhelming $18.6 million.
“Unbreakable” also took it on the chin in its fourth weekend, declining to $3.9 million or thereabouts, but the enigmatic Bruce Willis drama has already sold $83.2 million in tickets.
Even though “Emperor’s New Groove” didn’t open very strongly, it took away enough of the family audience to hobble both “102 Dalmatians” and “Rugrats in Paris.” The former declined to about $2.7 million, totaling a middling $48 million so far. The “Rugrats” sequel is nearing the end of its profitable run after five weeks, collecting about $1.8 million and about $63 million to date.
The top 12 movies of the weekend were expected to gross almost $99 million, according to Exhibitor Relations. Despite the short shelf life of many of the films in the top 12, the big hits continue to boost overall attendance. The past weekend was running about 33% ahead of the comparable weekend last year, a sign that the year 2000 could go out like a lion. Barring a sharp reversal, the $7.5-billion record set last year will probably fall.
Besides “Crouching Tiger,” several other limited-release films are getting attention from various critics’ awards and year-end kudos. The Marquis de Sade drama “Quills” broadened nicely to 61 screens in 18 cities, capturing $450,000, which brings its grand total to $1.4 million. “Pollock” debuted for a one-week Academy-qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles and grossed an extremely promising $44,000 on two screens. (It returns in February.) “You Can Count on Me” is still drawing on the specialty-house crowd with 248,000 over the past weekend in 52 theaters and $2.4 million so far.
Prospering from semisweet reviews, “Chocolat” had a lip-smacking debut of $160,000 on only eight screens.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Estimated Weekend
Grosses in Millions
1. “What Women Want”: $34.4
2. “Dude, Where’s My Car?”: $14
3. “How the Grinch . . . ": $13
4. “The Emperor’s New Groove”: $10
5. “Vertical Limit”: $9
6. “Proof of Life”: $5.2
7. “Unbreakable”: $3.9
8. “102 Dalmatians”: $2.7
9. “Dungeons & Dragons”: $2.2
10. “Rugrats in Paris: The Movie”: $1.8
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96bdfde684d74c33de5d38a1f3b63e8e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-19-ca-1772-story.html | Martin Will Host Oscars, Saying, ‘If You Can’t Win ‘Em, Join ‘Em’ | Martin Will Host Oscars, Saying, ‘If You Can’t Win ‘Em, Join ‘Em’
Which films will be chosen for this year’s Academy Awards is anybody’s guess, but at least one Oscar question has been answered: Steve Martin was chosen Monday to host the 73rd annual Academy Awards on March 25--the first time the comic actor, director and author has handled that duty.
The 55-year-old Martin is best known to film audiences for his roles in such films as “Parenthood” and “Roxanne.” But he began his career as a stand-up comic, famous for his zany performances on television and stage.
When Billy Crystal opted not to host the show this year for an eighth time, producer Gil Cates and academy President Bob Rehme drew up a short list of names to replace him. Rehme said Martin was very high on the list--though he would not say who else was on it. Last week, Cates and Martin met for lunch, and the actor agreed to do the show. Rehme said Martin will bring his own brand of conceptual and cerebral humor to the show.
“Steve is a major movie star, a writer, a producer, a director, an author and a playwright,” Rehme said Monday.
Martin, though, has never been nominated for an Oscar. “If you can’t win ‘em, join ‘em,” Martin said in a statement released by the academy.
Though Martin was catapulted into stardom by his comedic flair, he has lately opted to do more serious fare such as starring in David Mamet’s 1998 “The Spanish Prisoner” and even writing a novel, “Shopgirl.” Still, Martin’s persona was shaped by his classic performances on “Saturday Night Live” in the late 1970s as a “wild and crazy guy” and as King Tut.
Rehme noted, however, that it’s the films, not the show, that take center stage on Oscar night. “The key for the Oscars is recognizing the achievement of these artists. . . . Hopefully the show will be somewhat entertaining.”
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61f8656643ae0837b0dda57b45978263 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-31-cl-6640-story.html | The Afterlife of an East L.A. Shul | The Afterlife of an East L.A. Shul
Neil Diamond prayed here. So did Al Jolson, or at least that’s what the old-timers claim. Now, there is mostly just darkness and decay and the indignant ruffling of pigeons, the sole remaining tenants of the Breed Street Shul.
As Robert Chattel picks his way through the crumbling Boyle Heights synagogue, flashlight in hand, the scene has the uncanny aura of an archeological dig. Briefly, he illuminates a row of dusty pews engraved with the Star of David. Overhead, a yawning hole spills light onto water-damaged frescoes of zodiac signs, rendered in a whimsical folk-art style. A scattering of wooden tablets inscribed with Hebrew letters suggests the previous owners left this place in a hurry.
It’s been barely a half-dozen years since the 1923 building’s elderly congregation shut its doors for the last time, surrendering its sanctuary to the El Nin~o rains and graffiti taggers. But an effort to resurrect the Orthodox synagogue--one of a handful of surviving temples in an area that once boasted dozens of them--already has begun, in a struggle pitting patience and memory against time and indifference.
Seeking to honor a spiritual monument while reinvigorating the community around it, an unusual alliance of Jewish and Latino groups is preparing to raise funds for a massive restoration-make-over of the shul. With an eye on posterity, the leading plan is to convert the historic structure into a museum dedicated to the neighborhood’s rich, polyglot history. Melding the building’s past with its present, the shul also would be retrofitted as a neighborhood cultural center, serving heavily Latino Boyle Heights.
Among those involved in reviving the Breed Street synagogue, or shul--an affectionate, vernacular term meaning a place of prayer and learning--are the Boyle Heights Neighbors Organization, the East Los Angeles Community Corp. and the building’s owner, the Jewish Historical Society of Southern California. All joined forces in the late 1990s, shortly after the congregation that had occupied the building for decades disbanded.
“I think the shul really can become the cultural center of the community,” says East L.A. native and Boyle Heights activist Elsa Casillas-Cambon, echoing a growing sentiment. “I call it a little jewel that’s going to be fixed up and repaired,” says Mary Mendoza, a Boyle Heights Neighbors Organization member who has lived in the area since the 1930s.
For its Jewish sponsors, the challenge is to preserve the shul’s historical legacy and architectural integrity while creating a multipurpose facility that responds to the area’s changing demographics. “I think most people know of this Jewish history, the folklore of the community,” says Chattel, a preservation architect and board member of the Jewish Historical Society, which secured the title to the synagogue from the city of Los Angeles last July. “The Breed Street Shul is a remnant of that community, and maybe the seed of something that could be there in the future.”
At present, that seed is trying to take root in tenuous soil. Located in the heart of East Los Angeles, a few steps from Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard, the shul is a sentimental relic in a neighborhood where incomes are low and crime rates are high. Over the years, scores of Boyle Heights homes and businesses have fallen to new freeways and other icons of progress, while residents have struggled to secure their share of city services. Even getting a new traffic signal can take as long as a year, community leaders say.
Compounding the difficulty facing the shul is its gradual detachment from its natural constituency: the 600,000 Jews who live in Los Angeles County but may barely know the building exists. “Some say Jews don’t have a real attachment to their buildings because we had to move so much,” says Jewish Historical Society president Stephen J. Sass. “You had to have a sort of portable religion.”
It seems an appropriate footnote that the shul and several of its congregants appeared in the 1980 remake of “The Jazz Singer,” starring Neil Diamond as the God-fearing cantor’s son torn between religious filiation and the American dream.
Though it’s said that scenes from Jolson’s original 1927 version of the film, Hollywood’s first “talkie,” also were shot there, no one has turned up any photographic proof.
Although planning and fund-raising are still in early stages, the Breed Street Shul Project Inc., a nonprofit entity created by the Jewish Historical Society, has been holding meetings with community leaders and soliciting ideas on the shul’s redevelopment. Private foundations, including the California Endowment and the J. Paul Getty Trust, through the National Trust for Historic Preservation, have awarded planning grants totaling $55,000. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton praised the building and brought attention to its plight during a visit two years ago. The Federal Emergency Management Agency also has stepped in with a $289,636 grant to help finance a first-phase seismic retrofit of the main red brick sanctuary. Top priority is installing a new roof this summer.
The cost of restoring and converting the building is estimated at $6 million. Besides a museum and cultural center, other potential uses could include adult education and recreation classes, children’s art programs, a computer lab and a performance center. “By and large, the community’s really underserved in terms of access to cultural activities and cultural venues,” says Casillas-Cambon.
It would be a dramatic turnabout for the building, which in only a few years had devolved into a gang hangout, drop-in drug swap meet and impromptu dump site. If not for a towering wrought-iron fence, erected four years ago by the city, the shul might be totally trashed.
“It was a menacing structure in the neighborhood because it really did feel like a no-man’s land,” says Maria Cabildo, executive director of the East Los Angeles Community Corp. Today, its neighbors keep watch over the shul, and two cantankerous roosters belonging to a house next door kick up a fuss if anyone wanders too close.
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Formally known as Congregation Talmud Torah, the shul was once the largest Orthodox synagogue in Los Angeles and a monument to an immigrant people’s civic and spiritual ambitions. From the 1920s through the early ‘50s, when Boyle Heights and the adjoining City Terrace neighborhood were home to between 75,000 and 90,000 Jews--the highest concentration west of Chicago--the Breed Street synagogue was dubbed “Queen of the Shuls.”
Designed by Abram Edelman, son of L.A.'s first rabbi, and constructed at a cost of $75,000, the building’s Byzantine-revival architecture evoked Old World traditions its worshipers had left behind. Most were Eastern European refugees fleeing the Russian czar’s pogroms and the predations of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. Boyle Heights was a kind of West Coast Ellis Island en route to the Promised Land of middle-class assimilation. The shul became a beacon for these new arrivals. “It was the most beautiful building that people of rather modest means could have,” Sass says.
In its prime, between the two world wars, the shul stood in a vibrant community of Jews, Latinos and Japanese. During that period, dozens of kosher restaurants, bakeries and cafes with Yiddish and Hebrew signs lined Brooklyn Avenue, as the boulevard used to be known. The aroma of burritos and challah bread mingled outside greengrocers and bathhouses, union halls and movie houses. Mariachi and klezmer tunes drifted from apartment windows. Socialists and Zionists argued on street corners in Yiddish and Spanish. A two-piece suit cost $3.99 at Zellman’s Menswear, the landmark store that closed in 1999.
“We had such a beautiful community growing up, with all the different nationalities: Mexican, Russian, Armenian, Italian, black people. I didn’t feel a stranger from any of them,” says Mary Mendoza.
The community, however, was far from utopian. In the 1950s, as the population in the area was shifting from Jewish to Latino, gangs emerged and fights sometimes broke out. But the sometimes rival ethnic groups found common ground in labor unions and progressive political causes. Several future Chicano leaders earned their political spurs working side by side with the community’s Jewish left-wing intelligentsia.
Restrictive covenants in many L.A. neighborhoods limited where immigrants could settle. Gradually, the Boyle Heights area evolved into a haven for political outcasts and economic have-nots. It was multicultural before multicultural was cool. “My mom used to walk me to Canter’s Deli, and I would have eggs with matzo bread and then go to Catholic school,” recalls Tomas Benitez, executive director of Self-Help Graphics, the East Los Angeles printmaking center and Chicano art gallery. “It really kind of underscores a paradigm for where L.A. is right now.”
But in the years after World War II, suburban growth lured many Jews to Westwood, the Fairfax district and the San Fernando Valley. A large number of Japanese families, after being detained in internment camps, never returned to the old neighborhood. Increasingly, the shul became a solitary island with little relationship either to its community or to the Jewish families who’d moved away.
Sass thinks many Boyle Heights Jews may have had conflicted feelings about their New World shtetl, or enclave. On the one hand, they regarded it as a safe, homey place--"what we call haimish.” Yet there was “a sense of perhaps embarrassment about immigrant origins, the fact that it wasn’t high class. It was a place that you wanted to get out of and move on up.”
In recent years, as the shul’s aging worshipers died or moved away, the congregation had difficulty maintaining a minyan, or quorum, of 10 men necessary for daily prayers. Gradually, services were reduced to twice a week and the late Rabbi Mordecai Gansweig limited his time there to Sabbath services. By then, the congregation had retreated from the main sanctuary, which was declared unsafe after the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake, into the smaller chapel in the rear of the compound.
Soon, it was obvious that the shul no longer could survive solely as a place of worship. The congregation’s elders determined that the building should be torn down, the surrounding land sold and its proceeds donated to charity. But the building was spared after the Jewish Historical Society petitioned, successfully, to have it designated a protected city historic cultural monument. It fell to city ownership when back assessments went unpaid, and last July the city of Los Angeles deeded the building to the Jewish Historical Society.
As the project moves forward, the shul may be viewed as something of a harbinger of the city’s Latino-Jewish relations. With Jews and Latinos attempting to forge political alliances throughout the city, the shul’s time may again be at hand.
“Can it serve the neighborhood and coexist? Can it have a new life and not be an island?” Sass asks rhetorically. “I think that journey is as important to us as the final outcome. I think that people are really seeing this as an opportunity to connect with one another, which we don’t always have in this city.”
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6fb43f510352232bc6c71ac72f85aa2f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-feb-04-mn-61067-story.html | George Kahin; Asia Expert, Vietnam War Critic | George Kahin; Asia Expert, Vietnam War Critic
George McTurnan Kahin, 82, an expert on Southeast Asia who was a leading critic of Washington policy on the Vietnam War. Kahin served on the faculty of Cornell University for 37 years until his 1988 retirement. In the late 1960s he and John W. Lewis wrote “The United States in Vietnam,” an influential book that helped to turn people in the university world against U.S. intervention in Vietnam. He and Lewis wrote that U.S. policy was based on a distorted view of Vietnam, which, they said, was “a single nation, not two.” South Vietnam, Kahin and Lewis wrote, “constitutes an artificial creation whose existence depends on the sustained application of American power.” A critic reviewing the book for the Nation said it was “the most lucid and fully documented study” of U.S. involvement in the war that had yet been done. Kahin, born in Baltimore and raised in Seattle, received his bachelor’s degree in 1940 from Harvard, a master’s degree in 1946 from Stanford and a doctorate in 1951 from Johns Hopkins. A pioneer in the field of Southeast Asian studies, he directed Cornell’s South East Asia Program from 1951 to 1960. He was cited in a recent New York Times profile of Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger as a major influence on the foreign policy thinking of President Clinton’s national security advisor. On Saturday in a Rochester, N.Y., hospital.
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35a2469429556ff29d9dbaf6c3ce96b6 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-feb-06-me-61631-story.html | Bonnie Cashin; Influential Fashion Designer | Bonnie Cashin; Influential Fashion Designer
Bonnie Cashin, one of the most influential designers of American sportswear, died Thursday after open- heart surgery in New York City. She was 84.
Described by fashion experts as an “American sportswear original,” Cashin pioneered a style and way of dressing that still resonate in the work of contemporary designers such as Donna Karan, Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren.
The hallmarks of her clothes--simple, casual and loose-fitting--can be found today in garments hanging in closets across America. Cashin popularized the layering of lightweight and fluid clothes, which women welcomed in the 1940s and ‘50s as an option to wearing a heavy single dress.
Cashin was among a small group of women who emerged as influential designers after World War II. Until Paris was devastated by the war, French designers had dominated fashion, and it was their original designs that were widely copied by manufacturers.
But that changed as Cashin, Claire McCardell, Anne Klein and Vera Maxwell began to exert influence. Stores in Paris and London even had Cashin departments.
The American designer believed that clothing should be practical and functional. In 1955, Cashin told a reporter, “Fashion evolves from need.” She once described her designs as “articulating with the body.”
She traveled widely and drew heavily from her visits to Asia. The Japanese kimono was her inspiration for layering and detail such as wide sleeves.
Her signature elements were mohair and fine suede, supple leather to pipe edges of coat sleeves and unusual closures such as metal toggles.
She also designed purses for Coach. Her classic designs in the early 1960s included the shoulder bag and a clutch-style purse with a removable shoulder strap.
It was Cashin who made a fashion garment out of the poncho, a style popular today. In the 1960s, she created oversized plaid ponchos with hoods in luxurious fabrics such as mohair and wool and teamed them with plaid, fringed skirts.
Among Cashin’s pioneering designs were a turtleneck that did not require a zipper to get over the head, the kimono coat piped in leather, the hooded jersey dress, the jumpsuit, the snap-closed “pocketbook” pocket, canvas raincoats, soft knee-high boots and the use of industrial zippers.
She is famous for her dog leash skirt: a long wool garment that could be instantly shortened by latching a small brass ring sewn at the bottom to a small brass clasp sewn into the waistline.
In an interview with National Public Radio two years ago, Cashin explained the origin of the skirt. “My studio, out in the country, in Briarcliff, in the old carriage house, had steps that went up to a second floor. And I was constantly holding my skirts going up. I entertained a lot. And I’d be running up stairs with a martini in my hand. And so I thought I’d better hitch my skirt permanently.”
Born in Oakland to a photographer-inventor and a seamstress, Cashin lived in several Northern California towns during her early years before settling in Los Angeles.
Her career began soon after high school, when she joined a Los Angeles ballet company as its designer. In 1934, she moved to New York to work for the Roxy Theater, where she created three costume changes a week for each of the theater’s 24 dancers.
A Variety reporter called Cashin, who was then not yet 20, “the youngest designer ever to hit Broadway.” In her later years, she often credited her talent for designing clothes that moved well with the body to her experience of having to create costumes for dancers.
After the U.S. entered World War II, Cashin designed uniforms for women in the armed forces, but returned to costume design when she moved to Hollywood. She joined 20th Century Fox and created clothes for about 60 films, including, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” “Laura” and “Anna and the King of Siam.”
In 1949, she designed her first sportswear collection for Adler & Adler, a firm in New York City.
She formed her own company, Bonnie Cashin Designs, and soon won the Neiman Marcus and Coty American Fashion Critics awards. She was inducted into the Coty American Fashion Critics Hall of Fame in 1972.
In 1979 she helped found the Innovative Design Fund, a nonprofit foundation, to award grants to “innovative thinkers.” She was included in the 1998 exhibition “American Ingenuity: Sportswear 1930s-1970s” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
Cashin married Robert Sterner, an art director, early in her career, but they later divorced. She is survived by her longtime companion, Curtis Kellar.
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552ff79ae0480c0b59eb95cf8d1ef8d2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-feb-22-mn-1458-story.html | Clifton Daniel; Former N.Y. Times Editor, Son-in-Law of President Harry Truman | Clifton Daniel; Former N.Y. Times Editor, Son-in-Law of President Harry Truman
Clifton Daniel, urbane and meticulous former managing editor of the New York Times whom a colleague dubbed “the poor man’s Prince Rainier” when he married Margaret Truman, only child of the late President Harry S. Truman, has died at the age of 87.
Daniel died at his Manhattan home of complications from a stroke and heart disease, his wife told the New York newspaper, which reported the death on its Web site.
After nearly 15 years as a distinguished foreign correspondent for Associated Press and the New York Times, Daniel returned to New York in late 1955 for treatment of an ulcer and shortly afterward met his future wife at a dinner party.
Known for his courtly charm, impeccable grooming and Savile Row tailoring and a British accent layered over his native North Carolina drawl, Daniel proposed in January and married the president’s daughter in her home town of Independence, Mo., on April 21, 1956. He was 43 and she was 32.
“We had a lot in common,” Daniel wrote in a 1984 memoir. “A couple of citified small-towners, puritans among the fleshpots.”
Daniel’s New York Times colleague, James Reston, advised the new bride in his column the morning after the wedding that as a dedicated newsman, the bridegroom should not automatically be expected home in time for dinner.
“But when he does get home eventually, he will have something to say,” Reston promised her. “Few men who arrive home on the 6:22 train can do that.”
Reston tagged Daniel as “the poor man’s Prince Rainier” because the Monaco monarch was courting and marrying American movie actress Grace Kelly about the same time Daniel was wooing Truman. But most who knew Daniel thought the newsman cut an even finer and more opulent figure than Rainier.
In his London days, Daniel the eligible bachelor had been called “the sheik of Fleet Street,” Gay Talese recalled in his 1969 book about the New York Times titled “The Kingdom and the Power.” Daniel, Talese wrote, making clear that he was not impugning the then-managing editor’s masculinity in any way, “is almost lovely.”
At the time of Daniel’s marriage, a colleague noted that few American correspondents had ever demonstrated Daniel’s “ability to be equally at home at a hunt ball in Warwickshire or bumping along in a Russian jeep over the virgin farm lands of southwestern Siberia.”
Daniel headed the New York Times’ news staff as its managing editor from 1964 to 1969, greatly expanding its cultural coverage. He later was named associate editor and served as Washington bureau chief from 1973 to 1976, retiring in 1977.
Aspects of what Talese called Daniel’s “London layer” included the editor’s British-style office off the Times newsroom and selection of his black leather office chair precisely because it would not wrinkle his suits.
The only child of pharmacist Elbert Clifton Daniel Sr., for whom he was named, Daniel grew up in his native Zebulon, N.C., working as a soda jerk in his father’s store and writing local news for the Zebulon Record. When a man walked into the drugstore one night, “apparently holding his head on with his hands” with his throat slit ear to ear, the youth got a doctor for the victim and a story for the paper.
Daniel studied English and journalism at the University of North Carolina, but since boyhood looked upon journalism as his “calling,” imbued with a high ethical code. He was vice president of his collegiate student body but declined to run for president at age 20, he told an interviewer years later, “because I already had the notion--perhaps somewhat presumptuous--that I was a newspaperman, and that newspapermen should stay out of party politics.”
After graduation, he became associate editor and co-founder of the Daily Bulletin in Dunn, N.C., and a year later went to the Raleigh News and Observer as a reporter and columnist. Disliking his first name, Elbert, he gradually shifted his byline in those years to E.C. Daniel, and after going to Associated Press in New York in 1937, settled on Clifton Daniel.
He worked for the wire service in Washington, D.C.; Bern, Switzerland; and London where he joined the New York Times in 1944 to cover the final year of World War II. Following the U.S. First Army into Belgium and Germany, Daniel on a single day in November 1944 filed news stories from Eupen, Belgium; Aachen, Germany; and Vaals, the Netherlands.
In 13 years as the paper’s foreign correspondent, Daniel covered London, where he reported on the death and funeral of King George VI and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the Middle East and Moscow, where he won the Overseas Press Club award.
Throughout his career as a writer and editor, Daniel occasionally moderated or spoke on radio and television shows including “Meet the Press,” “Insight,” “One Man’s Opinion” and “News in Perspective.”
Daniel is survived by his wife; their four sons, Clifton Truman Daniel, William Wallace Daniel, Harrison Gates Daniel and Thomas Washington Daniel, and five grandchildren.
The Associated Press and Times staff writer John Goldman in New York City contributed to this article.
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18eb2f3d4ca0452704ea8f60486bd39e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-feb-25-fi-2430-story.html | 3Com Shares Hit a Price High as IPO for Palm Inc. Nears | 3Com Shares Hit a Price High as IPO for Palm Inc. Nears
Shares of 3Com Corp., the No. 2 maker of computer networking equipment, climbed 6.9% on Thursday to a record amid rising enthusiasm for next week’s initial public offering of shares in its Palm Inc. unit.
3Com rose $5.38 to $83, surpassing the previous high of $80.13 on Dec. 9, 1996. The stock traded as low as 20 in April 1999. Shares of Santa Clara, Calif.-based 3Com have tripled since it unveiled plans for the Palm IPO and spinoff in September.
The company’s 1997 acquisition of modem maker U.S. Robotics Corp. has dragged down 3Com’s shares for three years, saddling it with slower-than-expected sales, inventory backups and falling prices. Now, investors are focusing on Palm, the No. 1 maker of electronic organizers, which 3Com also got when it bought U.S. Robotics.
“It’s going to be a hot deal,” said Bill Becklean, an analyst at Suntrust Equitable Securities in Boston, who rates 3Com a “buy.” About $20 billion of 3Com’s $28.4-billion market value is coming from Palm, he said.
Palm is the only one of 3Com’s three product groups in which sales rose in the most recent quarter. Revenue in the unit rose 77% to $261 million as 3Com’s total revenue fell 4.3% to $1.47 billion.
Investors want a piece of 3Com so they can get shares of Palm when 3Com spins off the unit in about six months. Palm hopes to raise $368 million through the offering.
This week, Palm introduced its first organizer with a color screen, betting customers will pay more for the option.
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80e0110bc1e56bd76cff6c4b4d084f75 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-01-ca-49542-story.html | NPR Names Century’s 100 Most Significant Songs | NPR Names Century’s 100 Most Significant Songs
In an exercise sure to start arguments among music lovers, National Public Radio has created its list of the 100 most important American musical works of the century.
The list started with 300 songs suggested by a group of producers, artists and experts familiar to NPR. In mid-October, NPR allowed the public to vote on the selection. More than 13,000 listeners cast their votes online and through the mail.
A panel of 15 musicians considered the same 300 songs. Classical conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, singer-songwriter Aimee Mann and jazz saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom were among the panelists. Their votes and those of listeners were combined in the final list.
The works, listed alphabetically, don’t necessarily represent a performer’s best effort. They are pieces that signaled a breakthrough, revealed a new voice or captured the mood of an era.
“Obviously, any list is going to lead to some debate, and that’s certainly important and fun,” said Michael Abrahams, an NPR spokesman.
NPR will air a feature on one piece each Monday for a year on “All Things Considered.” Other works will be featured on NPR programs such as “Weekend Edition Sunday” and “Performance Today.”
National Public Radio’s 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century:
* “Adagio for Strings”: by Samuel Barber (1938).
* “Ain’t That a Shame”: by Antoine “Fats” Domino and Dave Bartholomew, as performed by Fats Domino (1955).
* “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”: by Irving Berlin (1911).
* “All or Nothing at All”: by Jack Lawrence and Arthur Altman, as performed by Frank Sinatra with Harry James and His Orchestra (1939).
* “Appalachian Spring”: Aaron Copland (1944).
* “As Time Goes By”: by Herman Hupfeld (1931).
* “Back in the Saddle Again”: by Ray Whitley and Gene Autry, as performed by Gene Autry (1939).
* “Blowin’ in the Wind”: by Bob Dylan, as performed by Bob Dylan (1962).
* “Blue Moon of Kentucky”: by Bill Monroe (1946), as performed by Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys (1954).
* “Blue Suede Shoes”: Carl Perkins, as performed by Carl Perkins (1955).
* “Body and Soul”: words by Edward Heyman, Robert Sour and Frank Eyton, music by Johnny Green (1930), as performed by Coleman Hawkins and His Orchestra (1939).
* “Born to Run”: LP, Bruce Springsteen (1975).
* “A Chorus Line”: musical, words by Edward Kleban, music by Marvin Hamlisch (1975).
* “Coal Miner’s Daughter”: by Loretta Lynn, as performed by Loretta Lynn (1970).
* “Crazy”: by Willie Nelson, as performed by Patsy Cline (1961).
* “Django”: John Lewis, as performed by the Modern Jazz Quartet (1954).
* “Dream a Little Dream of Me”: words by Gus Kahn, music by Wilbur Schwandt and Fabian Andre (1931).
* “Drumming”: Steve Reich (1971).
* “Fiddler on the Roof”: musical, words by Sheldon Harnick, music by Jerry Bock (1964).
* “Fine and Mellow”: by Billie Holiday (1940), as performed by Billie Holiday with Mal Waldron All Stars on “The Sound of Jazz” (CBS-TV, 1957).
* “Fire and Rain”: by James Taylor, as performed by James Taylor (1970).
* “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”: Earl Scruggs, as performed by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys (1949).
* “4:33": John Cage (1952).
* “Give My Regards to Broadway”: by George M. Cohan (1904).
* “Gone With the Wind”: film score, Max Steiner (1939).
* “Good Vibrations”: words by Mike Love and Brian Wilson, music by Brian Wilson, as performed by the Beach Boys (1966).
* “Graceland”: LP, Paul Simon (1986).
* “Grand Canyon Suite”: Ferde Grofe (1931).
* “Great Balls of Fire”: by Otis Blackwell and Jack Hammer, as performed by Jerry Lee Lewis (1957).
* “The Great Pretender”: by Buck Ram, as performed by the Platters (1955).
* “Guys and Dolls”: musical, by Frank Loesser (1950).
* “Hellhound on My Trail”: by Robert Johnson, as performed by Robert Johnson (1937).
* “Hello Dolly”: by Jerry Herman, as performed by Louis Armstrong (1964).
* “His Eye Is on the Sparrow”: by C.D. Martin and C.H. Gabriel, as performed by Mahalia Jackson (1958).
* “Hoochie Coochie Man”: by Willie Dixon, as performed by Muddy Waters (1954).
* “Hound Dog/Don’t Be Cruel”: by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, Otis Blackwell and Elvis Presley, as performed by Elvis Presley (1956).
* “I Got Rhythm”: words by Ira Gershwin, music by George Gershwin (1930).
* “I Walk the Line”: by Johnny Cash, as performed by Johnny Cash (1956).
* “I Wanna Be Sedated”: by the Ramones, as performed by the Ramones (1978).
* “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”: by Hank Williams, as performed by Hank Williams (1949).
* “In the Mood”: words by Andy Razaf, music by Joe Garland (1938), as performed by Glenn Miller and his Orchestra (1939).
* “Goodnight Irene”: by Lead Belly and John Lomax (1936).
* “Kind of Blue”: LP, Miles Davis (1959).
* “King Porter Stomp”: Jelly Roll Morton (1923).
* “Ko Ko”: Charlie Parker, as performed by Charlie Parker (1945).
* “La Bamba”: by William Clauson, as performed by Ritchie Valens (1958).
* “Let’s Stay Together”: by Al Green, Willie Mitchell and Al Jackson, as performed by Al Green (1971).
* “Light My Fire”: by John Densmore, Robert Krieger, Raymond Manzarek and Jim Morrison, as performed by the Doors (1967).
* “Like a Rolling Stone”: by Bob Dylan, as performed by Bob Dylan (1965).
* “A Love Supreme”: LP, John Coltrane (1964).
* “Mack the Knife”: words by Marc Blitzstein (after Bertold Brecht), music by Kurt Weill (1928 and 1956).
* “Maybellene”: by Chuck Berry, as performed by Chuck Berry and his Combo (1955).
* “Mood Indigo”: by Duke Ellington, Albany “Barney” Bigard and Irving Mills, as performed by Duke Ellington and his Orchestra (1930).
* “My Fair Lady”: musical, words by Alan Jay Lerner, music by Frederick Loewe (1956).
* “My Funny Valentine”: words by Lorenz Hart, music by Richard Rodgers (1937).
* “My Girl”: by Smokey Robinson and Ronald White, as performed by the Temptations (1964).
* “Night and Day”: by Cole Porter (1932).
* “A Night in Tunisia”: by Dizzy Gillespie and Frank Paparelli (1944), as recorded by Dizzy Gillespie and his Orchestra (1946).
* “Oklahoma!”: musical, words by Oscar Hammerstein, music by Richard Rodgers (1943).
* “Once in a Lifetime”: by David Byrne, Brian Eno and Talking Heads, as performed by Talking Heads (1980).
* “One O’Clock Jump”: Count Basie, as performed by the Count Basie Orchestra (1937).
* “Oye Como Va”: by Tito Puente (1963), as performed by Santana (1970).
* “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”: by James Brown, as performed by James Brown (1965).
* “Peggy Sue”: by Jerry Allison, Buddy Holly and Norman Petty, as recorded by Buddy Holly (1957).
* “Porgy and Bess”: opera, words by Ira Gershwin and Dubose Heyward, music by George Gershwin (1935).
* “Psycho”: film score, Bernard Herrmann (1960).
* “Purple Haze”: by Jimi Hendrix, as performed by the Jimi Hendrix Experience (1967).
* “Rapper’s Delight”: by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers, as performed by Sugar Hill Gang (1979).
* “Respect”: by Otis Redding (1965), as performed by Aretha Franklin (1967).
* “Rhapsody in Blue”: George Gershwin (1924), orchestrated by Ferde Grofe, (1924, 1926 and 1942).
* "(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock”: by Max Freedman and James Myers, also known as Jimmy De Knight (1953), first recorded by Bill Haley and his Comets (1954).
* “Round Midnight”: words by Bernard Hanighen, music by Thelonius Monk and Cootie Williams (1944).
* "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66": by Bobby Troup, as performed by the King Cole Trio (1946).
* “The St. Louis Blues”: by W.C. Handy (1914), as performed by Bessie Smith (1925).
* “Show Boat”: musical, words by Oscar Hammerstein, music by Jerome Kern (1927).
* “Sing, Sing, Sing”: by Louis Prima (1936), as arranged by Jimmy Mundy and performed by Benny Goodman and his Orchestra at Carnegie Hall (1938).
* “Singin’ in the Rain”: film musical, by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown (1952).
* "(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay”: by Otis Redding and Steve Cropper, as performed by Otis Redding (1967).
* “Smells Like Teen Spirit”: words by Kurt Cobain, music by Nirvana, as performed by Nirvana (1991).
* “Stand by Your Man”: by Tammy Wynette and Billy Sherrill, as performed by Tammy Wynette (1968).
* “Star Dust”: words by Mitchell Parish, music by Hoagy Carmichael (1927).
* “Symphony of Psalms”: Igor Stravinsky (1930, 1948).
* “Take Five”: Paul Desmond, as performed by the Dave Brubeck Quartet (1959).
* “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”: by Thomas A. Dorsey (1932).
* “Take the ‘A’ Train”: by Billy Strayhorn, as performed by Duke Ellington and his Orchestra (1941).
* “Talking Book”: LP, Stevie Wonder (1972).
* “Tapestry”: LP, Carole King (1971).
* “Theme From ‘Shaft’ ”: by Isaac Hayes, as performed by Isaac Hayes (1971).
* “This Land Is Your Land”: by Woody Guthrie (1940).
* “Tom Dooley”: traditional, as arranged by Dave Guard and performed by Kingston Trio (1958).
* “The Velvet Underground and Nico”: LP, the Velvet Underground (1967).
* Warner Bros. cartoon music: Carl Stalling (1936 to 1958).
* “We Shall Overcome”: by Zilphia Horton, Frank Hamilton, Guy Carawan, Pete Seeger (1960), from C. Albert Tindley’s Baptist hymn “I’ll Overcome Some Day” (1901).
* “West End Blues”: words by Clarence Williams, music by Joe Oliver, as performed by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five (1928).
* “West Side Story”: musical, words by Stephen Sondheim, music by Leonard Bernstein (1957).
* “What’d I Say”: by Ray Charles, as performed by Ray Charles (1959).
* “What’s Going On?”: by Al Cleveland, Marvin Gaye and Renaldo Benson (1970), as performed by Marvin Gaye (1971).
* “White Christmas”: by Irving Berlin (1942), as performed by Bing Crosby (1942).
* “Wildwood Flower”: by Maude Irving and J.P. Webster, as arranged by A.P Carter and performed by the Carter Family (1928).
* “Wizard of Oz”: film musical, words by E.Y. “Yip” Harburg and music by Harold Arlen (1939).
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f23daabd6616f9094f14701498d259db | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-02-tr-49838-story.html | Spoiled by the Unspoiled in Tobago | Spoiled by the Unspoiled in Tobago
What’s the penalty here for trespassing? I had to wonder, because there’s no way a beach as beautiful as Bloody Bay could be this empty unless it was private. My friend, Nancy, and I had lolled on the white sand and swum in the clear, warm water for two hours and hadn’t seen a soul. Until now.
A boy was approaching from the far end of the sand. Shirtless, he wore high-top basketball shoes and bluejeans held up by a makeshift yellow cloth belt. We figured he was the son of the owner wanting us off his turf. Nope.
His name was Chiemeka. He was 13 and had been catching sand crabs for his mother. He saw our rental car and hoped we’d give him a lift up the hill and down the road to his village.
I asked him if this beautiful beach ever got crowded.
Never, he said. “It’s kind of far away.”
So is Tobago. Thank God.
If the chain of Caribbean islands is the rainbow of the Western Hemisphere, the nation at the end of that rainbow is truly a pot of gold. Trace the Caribbean isles south, and your index finger bottoms out at Trinidad and Tobago, two islands united since independence from Britain in 1962. Tobago is 40 miles off the northeast coast of Venezuela and just 12 miles north of Trinidad, its bigger and busier sister island.
As with any pot of gold, Tobago is not easy to get to. Only one U.S. airline flies here--American, from San Juan, Puerto Rico. I was using bonus miles from United on its mileage partner Air Canada. My trip--no, make that journey--involved a six-hour layover in Toronto and a five-hour layover in Trinidad before a 30-minute British West Indies Airways flight that touched down in Tobago 23 hours after I’d left my home in Denver. Getting to Katmandu took me less time.
It was worth the trouble. Tobago (population 18,600) is what the Caribbean once was. The era of untouched bays and beaches may have ended with the first wave of European exploration in the Caribbean. But much of Tobago (derived from the Carib Indian word for tobacco) would look pretty much the same to Columbus as it did in 1498, when he sailed past on the way to Trinidad. Secluded bays and palm-fringed beaches but no (visible) hotels and few people. A rain forest that covers a quarter of the island, with one of the most magnificent waterfalls in the Caribbean. World-class scuba diving, snorkeling and bird-watching.
What also hasn’t changed is a fierce resolve among the people to keep the island their island. They vow not to give in to the get-rich-quick beachfront sale bonanza that plagues the islands to the north, or the urbanization that cripples their sister island to the south. And the government is doing everything it can to help.
“Money’s not everything,” said Darrion Kent, a bird-watching and rain forest guide. “Everybody who goes to Trinidad says Tobago is better. We want to keep it that way.”
It didn’t take long for us to learn Tobago isn’t one giant souvenir stand. Nancy and I landed at the little airport at 8 a.m. and got in a cab driven by a fellow named Linsom. We were thirsty and wanted a cold drink before we started the 90-minute ride to our hotel on the north end of the island. I offered to buy Linsom one if he would stop somewhere. Anywhere.
Three times we stopped at one of the tiny wooden snack shacks that dot Tobago’s roadside, all emblazoned with Coke signs, before we found one that had any in stock: It had one bottle. I dejectedly walked back with one Coke and one apology.
“That’s OK,” Linsom said. “I just said I wanted one to be polite.”
Fortunately, deserted beaches were easier to find. As Linsom slowly wound his way up the road on the island’s southern side, isolated beaches jumped in and out of the landscape. I kept expecting fences reading “Property of Big and Bigger Hotels Ltd.” But the only thing between us and the water was the occasional pile of driftwood.
Finally we passed through the village of Speyside on Tobago’s eastern end. We climbed a steep hill topped by a spectacular lookout over an isolated bay right off a tourist poster, then dropped through rich vegetation to our hotel.
The Blue Waters Inn is probably the classiest hotel outside the tourism enclave near the airport. It’s on its own large, lush property looking out toward Little Tobago, an islet a few miles offshore. We could get up from the rattan chairs on the private porch outside our spacious (standard) room and walk no more than 30 feet into the Atlantic waters of Batteaux Bay. A 45-minute drive across the island would take us to the Caribbean Sea. The room rate in November: $95. That gets you a closet in Martinique.
Tobago has two sides. One encompasses a five-mile stretch between the capital city of Scarborough and the southern tip. That’s where the airport’s runway nearly runs onto the beautiful, palm-lined Pigeon Point beach, which has attracted a handful of resorts. (A 200-room Hilton is scheduled to open this year, a development the government says is an aberration, not a trend.) The other side of Tobago consists of everything to the north, about 80% of the island.
“Someone living here said we should have passport control on Speyside Lookout, because over the mountain it’s a totally different world,” says David Hairston, the general manager of Blue Waters.
Tobago’s differences can best be seen on its beaches. While Blue Waters’ beach is beautiful in its simplicity and Speyside is the jumping-off point for diving and snorkeling the Atlantic reefs, the Caribbean side is lined with beaches spectacular in their isolation. We rented a Jeep for $55 a day (including $10 highly recommended insurance) and spent two lazy days checking out four beaches on the Caribbean north side.
The four beaches, at Bloody Bay, Parlatuvier Bay, Englishman’s Bay and Castara Bay, are so close you can almost tour them on foot.
The most beautiful of the four is Englishman’s. Driving down the narrow two-lane road from Parlatuvier, we spotted a crude wooden sign saying “Englishman’s” pointing down a mud path. We turned right, drove precariously across 100 feet of mud and parked in a clearing shaded by palm trees and opening up to a postcard-perfect beach. The half-moon bay was lined with palm trees and fine white sand marked only by the occasional piece of driftwood. The lone visible structure was a tiny snack stand.
I have been to eight other islands in the Caribbean and all over the Bahamas, and this was by far the best beach I’ve seen. Yet at 11:30 on a Saturday morning, Englishman’s Bay had exactly five visitors.
Eula Agard was tending the snack stand, selling roti, Trinidad and Tobago’s national dish of meat and sauce wrapped in flat bread. Her husband, Kenny, sells his carvings at the same stand.
Nancy and I bought charming carved wood bird feeders from Kenny and took off down the beach. We stopped on a hill overlooking majestic Parlatuvier Bay, where Nancy wanted to take pictures. I swung the Jeep into a driveway to turn around. Suddenly forgetting I was in a former British Commonwealth country where driving is on the left, I looked to the right, down the hill, instead of left as I backed out.
Whoosh! A car carrying three men barely missed my back bumper, swerving wildly to avoid my car and then swerving again to avoid a cliff of solid rock on the other side. The car slammed on its brakes and backed up. Uh-oh, I thought, I’m dead. Instead, a huge man with a meaty face merely talked to me quietly in the rapid-fire Tobagonian dialect. I understood one phrase: “Watch where you’re going.”
Tobago is a friendly place, not yet overrun by fussy tourists. Most seem to come for active water sports and relaxation; there’s no night life to speak of, at least on the Atlantic side, where we stayed.
There’s also no crime. Tobago recorded one homicide in 1998. Trinidad, by contrast, had 89.
Tobago’s future is in the powerful hands of people like Charles Turpin. Raised in Trinidad, Turpin was educated in England and has lived in Tobago for 32 years. His full head of sandy hair and free spirit belie his 63 years. I found him “liming,” a Tobagonian term for hanging out, in Charlotteville, a charming fishing village on the northeast tip of the island.
Turpin’s grandfather bought land in Tobago in 1875, and today Turpin owns more than 1,000 acres around Charlotteville. Club Med has approached him. So have other hotels. Turpin won’t budge.
“I’ve turned away millions of dollars,” Turpin said. “We have enough to live on.”
But do the natives? Unemployment runs about 15%, higher than in oil-rich Trinidad. I asked Turpin how the locals know they’re better off without mass tourism.
“We read magazines. We read local newspapers,” he said. “It’s already gone to hell down south.”
I believed Turpin. In driving around Tobago for two weeks in November, we saw little poverty. No starvation on the streets, few beggars, very little trash. Two boatmen once took us to Lovers Beach, a tiny, secluded spot around the cove from Charlotteville. We had agreed on a round trip of 50 Trinidad and Tobago dollars (about $8 U.S.). When they picked us up four hours later, they changed it to 80 dollars. No way, I said, and hopped in the boat. They didn’t press it and took us back for 50.
Turpin laughed when he heard the story. “We’re not really sophisticated enough to be in the rip-off business,” he said. “We weren’t really ready for tourism. It took us by surprise. Until five or 10 years ago, there were only three hotels here.”
That has changed and will continue to change. The question is whether the government will adhere to its promise of controlled growth. Tobago gets a manageable number of tourists--about 40,000 a year, mostly German and English--who take direct flights into the island. When the Hilton opens, Tobago will have 1,700 rooms. The plan is to expand to 3,000 and stop, said Carlos Dillon, the executive director of the Mount Irvine Bay Hotel and Golf Club and president of the Trinidad and Tobago Hotel Assn.
“That probably gives us near full employment,” he said.
The government will not tolerate unchecked growth, Dillon said. It recently rejected a bid to build inexpensive guest houses around Englishman’s Bay. Only “ecological lodges” and “small indigenous developments” in the north end will be allowed, Dillon said.
Who knows? Unchecked growth could lead to such unmentionables as . . . menus. Tobago’s dining is as laid-back as its beaches. Restaurants are more like family gatherings. Except in Scarborough, where there are a few high-end restaurants, menus are rare.
At Jemma’s Treehouse in Speyside or Redman’s next door, we sat on an open-air veranda with doilies on the tables and great views of the ocean. A waitress would appear and merely say, “We have chicken, shrimp, fish and pork.” The choice is in the way it’s cooked. Creole. Garlic and butter. Sweet and sour. Fried. Baked. All with fresh island spices. A typical lunch would be fish or chicken, rice, macaroni pie, soup and salad, all for about $6. The same menu is served at dinner for $12.
It’s easy to work up an appetite in Tobago. Exercise is part of the culture. Village social life revolves around makeshift soccer fields where pickup games are frequent and festive. Besides world-class scuba diving, where giant manta rays can be seen in the “dry season” (December through May), hiking is a must. One day we took a 15-minute boat ride to Little Tobago, a government-protected island just off Speyside and home to many of Tobago’s 430 bird species. Here we stood atop a cliff with three globe-trotting English bird-watchers as they photographed and marveled at the rare red-billed tropic bird. Said birder Laurie King as he lifted his eyes from his binoculars, “This is just a little dream.”
The next day Nancy and I finished our stay with a hike through Tobago’s 14,000-acre Forest Reserve, established in 1776 and believed to be the oldest protected rain forest in the Western Hemisphere.
If you go there, bring a long lens and binoculars, and also bring a swimsuit. At the end of the day we stopped off at nearby Argyll Waterfall, on the outskirts of the rain forest. For about $3.50, we walked (15 minutes) to a spectacular cascade of water 170 feet high, falling in three separate levels. We tore off our sweaty clothes and had a nice cool swim before climbing up a crude path to a second tier, where we sat on smooth rocks and let the cascade batter us into laughter. We then climbed even farther to the falls’ deepest swimming pool, where a Tarzan rope hung for those into swinging from rocky cliffs.
As we sat there, tired but oh so relaxed, a diminutive elderly Tobagonian with a floppy hat stood on the side of a pool and played a soft tune on his saxophone. Entertainment at no extra cost. As in the rest of Tobago, the nearest cover charge was very far away.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
GUIDEBOOK
Idylling on an Island Apart
Getting there: American, Delta and TWA fly nonstop from Los Angeles to San Juan, Puerto Rico, connecting with American to Trinidad and Tobago; round-trip fares begin at $932.
Where to stay: Blue Waters Inn was offering an irresistible $95 per day in November, before the winter peak season, when the same room goes for $175. Telephone (868) 660- 4341, fax (868) 660-5195, e-mail bwitobago@trinidad.net.
A list of lodgings on Tobago, some with pictorial links, is on the tourism Internet site, https://www.visitTNT.com.
Where to eat: Jemma’s, in Speyside village, local telephone 660-4066, is the big tourist spot. It’s built into a tree and has a great view; no alcohol served. Sharron and Pheeb’s in Charlotteville, local tel. 660-5717, serves excellent fish; its bar is a friendly local hangout.
Where to play: Among the recommended scuba and snorkeling outfits (with PADI certified scuba instructors) in the Speyside area: Aquamarine Dive at the Blue Waters Inn, local tel. 660-4341; Tobago Dive at Manta Lodge, local tel. 660-4888; Tobago Dive Masters near Jemma’s, local tel. 639-9533.
For more information: Tourism and Industrial Development Co. of Trinidad and Tobago, tel. (888) 595-4868, Internet https://www.visitTNT.com.
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3fab2b323af6c9412e9a1f984e6ccd69 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-03-me-50281-story.html | What’s Germane Is a Soldier’s Behavior | What’s Germane Is a Soldier’s Behavior
Reignited by the brutal slaying of a gay soldier at Ft. Campbell, Ky., the controversy over gays in the military threatens to become as combative an issue at the end of the Clinton administration as it was at the beginning. In recent weeks, the president, vice president and first lady have separately criticized the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and Defense Secretary William S. Cohen has authorized an investigation of its enforcement.
There is an alternative. In 1993, we were members of an interdisciplinary Rand Corp. research team commissioned by President Clinton’s then-secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, to determine whether it would be possible to end the ban on homosexuals serving in the military “in a manner that is practical, realistic and consistent with the high standards of combat effectiveness and unit cohesion our armed forces must maintain.” The team concluded that it was possible and recommended to the administration a policy that, in effect, declared one’s sexual orientation “not germane” to military service.
Under this policy, all service members would have been held to the same behavioral standards. Inappropriate conduct, such as explicit discussions of sexual practices or desires, physical or verbal abuse based on sexual orientation or public displays of affection, would have been designated as unprofessional and subversive of good order and discipline. This code would have applied to heterosexuals and homosexuals alike.
We believe that this conduct-based policy merits serious consideration. Such a policy would require firm leadership, but it would not require sensitivity training, extensive revisions to military regulations or personnel policies or even changes of attitudes regarding homosexuality--so long as the military insisted on strict compliance by all service members--gay and straight.
Would this “not germane” policy undermine cohesion or degrade military performance? We searched widely but found no compelling evidence that it would. To be sure, hostility toward homosexuals is apparent among many active service members, and doubtless this would continue. Nonetheless, a nondiscrimination policy can be enforced without seriously interfering with military order and effectiveness.
We believe this because we examined dozens of empirical studies, both published and unpublished, of team cohesion and performance in military units, industrial and sports teams and other groups. We also analyzed the political and organizational process by which African Americans were integrated into the military in the 1940s and 1950s, despite tenacious racial animosities among service personnel and vigorous opposition by military leadership. Further, we investigated how nondiscrimination policies for gays and lesbians are working in practice in U.S. police and fire departments and in Israeli and European military forces. Too often, this evidence is dismissed as irrelevant, without serious consideration or refutation.
Indeed, a wealth of evidence, including the military’s own research, debunks the claim that gays would irreparably damage “task cohesion.” Liking all the members of one’s group on an interpersonal level--"social cohesion"--either has no measurable influence on performance or, at very high levels, actually may have a detrimental impact. In short, the military learned long ago that professionalism does not require you to like someone to work effectively with him or her.
Further, the experience of American urban police and fire departments suggests that even when allowed to do so, few gays and lesbians choose to “come out of the closet” in a setting of widespread intolerance. Most prefer to avoid incurring the kind of prejudice that will interfere with their career goals.
Covertly and overtly, gays always have served in the U.S. military, and they will continue to do so, whatever the official policy. Yet any policy that makes sexual orientation conspicuous, while also implying official intolerance of homosexuality, is a sure-fire recipe for continued conflict and controversy.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” may have seemed an artful compromise when it was enacted, but it heightened rather than neutralized fears about sexual orientation in the military. A conduct-based policy that applies equally to all service members and that treats sexual orientation as not germane to military service would reduce the salience of sexual preference while eliminating the appearance of tacit approval of hostility toward gay men and women in the armed forces.
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7342d1f2c414ee8276aa13e1999ffb22 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-08-mn-51979-story.html | Japanese Retailer Bucks a Trend by Selling Cheap | Japanese Retailer Bucks a Trend by Selling Cheap
Politicians are pumping $171 billion into yet another gargantuan stimulus package aimed at jump-starting the anemic Japanese economy. But one retailer is making his own economic miracle come true a buck at a time.
Daiso Industries Co., one of the few booming chains in Japan these days, sells every item in its stores for 100 yen--slightly less than $1. It already packs more than 1,300 outlets, known as 100 Yen Plazas, into a country roughly the size of California, and it’s growing exponentially. On average, two new stores are added every day.
Some are bigger than football fields, brimming with merchandise ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous: from surprisingly decent wineglasses and china to silly strap-on breasts. Brightly colored plastic bins, enough gadgets and tableware to stock a kitchen almost completely, tools, alarm clocks, neckties, office supplies, along with battery-operated massagers you never knew you needed, create a “video arcade for housewives"--a description coined by the chain’s founder, Hirotake Yano.
That Yano can sell 40,000 products for a standard 100 yen apiece is all the more surprising in Japan, where little can be purchased anywhere for a buck: not candy bars, not morning newspapers, not even a can of Coca-Cola. Indeed, competitors sell many of the same things at several times the price.
“At first, I was shocked when I saw the prices here,” college student Minako Ofuchi said as she loaded up on nail polish and hair accessories at the always-bustling five-story store in Tokyo’s trendy Shibuya section. “What’s really great about it is that I can buy so much, and it makes me feel like I’m spending a lot of money when I’m not.”
Her bill: About $8.
At Daiso’s equivalent of the Southland-based 99 Cents Only chain, revenues were expected to top $1.33 billion for the fiscal year that ends in March, a huge boost over the $777 million in sales at the privately held company in the previous year.
Daiso’s rock-bottom pricing is testament to the extraordinary zeal of Yano, 56, who is as jarring in the staid Japanese business world as are his prices. In fact, until he struck gold with Daiso, nearly everything he touched went bust, including a fish-farming business he took over from his in-laws.
For a while, he supported his family by what is known in Japan as “toilet paper exchange,” in which he collected newspapers to recycle, giving donors token rolls of toilet paper in return. It was one of nine jobs he has held over the years, and his failures were all the more humiliating because his father and two of his brothers are successful physicians.
“I learned that good times don’t last,” Yano said. “Since I haven’t been successful, I’m not greedy or rich.”
Empire Began on Back of a Truck
Daiso had humble beginnings. In 1977, Yano began hawking 100-yen items from a truck, parking it on vacant properties or streets just outside town. By 1991, when he opened his first retail space in the corner of a supermarket, 92 of his trucks were prowling Hiroshima-area streets.
In the early days, he overheard a homemaker’s hesitance to purchase a sugar bowl for $1 because her friend advised, “You get what you pay for.” From then on, Yano vowed to offer decent quality along with low prices. That philosophy has helped propel his recent growth rate of about 60 new stores or franchises a month.
The value-consciousness such growth implies is one reason Japanese officials are trying to ward off a deflationary spiral, as gloomy consumers, battered by continuing rounds of corporate job cutbacks, keep tightening their belts.
But Yano does more than just offer low prices. He also makes sure that merchandise is changing constantly to keep repeat customers from getting bored.
“We are aiming to sell 500 yen worth of goods to customers who drop in for 30 minutes,” he said. “That’s better than paying 2,000 yen [admission] for a movie.”
The 100 Yen Plazas even provide a form of entertainment. At one huge store in northern Tokyo, about 5,000 customers stroll through each day, the company said.
“I just come to kill time and look around--sometimes I buy many things, and sometimes I buy nothing,” said Miyoko Terada, who recently walked out of the Hiroshima store with 88 items, including five big ramen bowls, a dozen soy sauce dishes and about a dozen rice bowls for her small restaurant.
“Don’t you have enough now?” her husband was overheard asking, even as he tossed a Kabuki-figure kite into the shopping basket.
At company headquarters in rural Higashi Hiroshima, a 10-minute bullet-train ride from Hiroshima in southern Japan, watching founder Yano in action is like watching a Ping-Pong ball on speed. He can’t seem to sit still for more than a few seconds at a time, taking care of the most minor details, even though the headquarters staff now numbers 300.
In a chilly, brightly lighted former warehouse, product samples are arrayed: Racks of masks, shoe inserts, fake guns, cookware and stuffed animals are stacked on racks and interspersed among employees’ desks.
Workers take off their shoes when they enter--obligatory in Japanese homes but rare these days in large offices. Yano’s reason: to keep the office cleaner. As it is, all employees spend the first half-hour of each workday tidying the workplace, inside and out. The practice not only eliminates housekeeping costs, it builds teamwork, Yano said.
Does he take part?
“I’ve been neglecting to clean lately because I’ve been taking time to open the mail,” he said.
During a recent hourlong interview at a conference table set amid the office hubbub, Yano jumped up at least 25 times. “I have 20 guests coming today,” he explained.
He rushed outside to adjust the sign welcoming representatives of a major department store, stopped to chat with potential suppliers from China and cornered another supplier to ask him to draw the product Yano is thinking of making: plastic bricks. Yano told him to make them simple and square, nothing fancy.
“It’s not like a cool, good-looking business style,” Yano said of the way he runs the company. “Japanese people care too much about style or appearances.”
On this day, Yano donned a mask to get an easy laugh from his employees. At his favorite neighborhood lunch dive, where diners sitting around a grill shoveled onion and vegetable pancakes into their mouths using spatulas, he performed tricks with chopsticks and poured sake for the visiting retailers, who want to open 100 Yen sections in their stores.
But when it comes to negotiating prices, Yano has no time for fun and games. He once described product procurement as a “combat sport.”
“In the past, Japanese companies were able to sell whatever they bought, but now that stuff won’t sell anymore,” he said. Now, the strengthening yen is on Yano’s side, as Daiso procures more than 40% of its stock from overseas: There are glass canisters from Austria, beer steins from Turkey, trays from Brazil and plastic products from South Korea. For products made in Japan, buying in huge volume helps Yano charge bargain prices.
Smaller Markups, but Volume Sales
Just how profitable Daiso is, however, is anyone’s guess. Yano isn’t saying. But he does say that other Japanese firms are too greedy. Picking up a mirror on a wooden platform, he said: “This sells in Tokyu Hands [a popular household products store] for 1,500 yen, and they must earn a 500-yen profit. But Daiso sells 10,000 units per day, so a 10-yen profit is enough for us.”
Indeed, a quick price comparison showed that Tokyu Hands and other retailers charge hefty premiums: A semitransparent Halloween mask was on sale for 550 yen, a colored paper gift bag for 350 yen, a plastic clothes hanger for 400 yen and a toiletries holder for 1,000 yen.
A Tokyu Hands spokesman said the store has many competitors and is not “especially conscious” of Daiso.
Yano acknowledged that some of the items he sells are loss leaders to pull people into the store. Which ones? “I don’t know,” he said.
In some ways, Daiso seems an accident waiting to happen. If Yano is to be believed, the company has no budget and no business plan. It doesn’t take inventory through cash-register receipts to see what’s moving: The part-time cashiers simply count the number of items in a shopper’s basket and multiply by 100. Of Daiso’s 8,000 employees, 7,500 are part-timers, including many store managers. Moreover, it is expanding so rapidly that even Yano is troubled: He has urged his employees to slow the pace of new store openings.
For the time being, however, Daiso is making hay while the sun shines.
“I’m dreaming now,” Yano said. “I’m just hoping I won’t wake up from this dream. Things shouldn’t be working this well.”
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150324e09391db3c5eedecf7253f4477 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-09-me-52388-story.html | We Killed Music, Now We Take the Rap | We Killed Music, Now We Take the Rap
Many people will argue that the phrase “rap music” is an oxymoron. But what do those people find unsatisfactory or irritating about it? Rap has no melody, so what’s to sing?
What’s more, rap has no harmony, and in music, harmony is usually melody’s servant. So rap leaves out completely two out of the three ingredients we enjoy so much in songs.
The third ingredient in the music mix is rhythm. At first, rap didn’t provide its own rhythm; instead, it used prerecorded tracks. Its lyrics, however, provide a rhythm of their own, which at times is not unattractive, but because the lyrics are spoken or shouted at us, rather than sung to us, we are not drawn to them.
So there we are, with music that has no melody, no harmony and no rhythms of its own. Using these as criteria, maybe many people are right. Maybe “rap music” is indeed an oxymoron. Yet interestingly, the people who despise it most are those who might well be responsible for its creation and its place in our culture. Here’s why and how that might be so.
In the late 1970s, the results of Howard Jarvis’ tax revolt showed up in our public school systems. Polls were taken to get citizens’ comments and advice about how to use the now-fewer tax dollars for our schools. After the poll results were published, music classes were cut from top to bottom, from kindergarten through high school.
The absence of music devastated our children’s musical education. They’ve had no chance to learn to sing. They know nothing about melody or harmony and no longer have musical instrument instruction available, except privately, which is to say when the parents can afford it. Naturally, poorer neighborhoods felt the lack of music first. Inner-city schools, predominantly black neighborhood schools, were hit first. Therefore, whatever was going to substitute for music would start there.
There is no way you can take music away from kids! When they are teenagers, they will have music. Unable to play instruments and not taught to sing, they used prerecorded rhythm tracks to start to mouth their angry lyrics at us.
We invested heavily in having no music in our school systems and our investment in having no music paid off. We got what we paid for--no music. The fruit of that investment is now harshly lecturing us from the bandstand, without melody and without harmony.
If we want to reverse the trend, if we want to hear music from our future generations, then we need to put our money where their mouths are--show our students how to sing with a vengeance, if they must, but sing with melody and play and sing with harmony, the kind that they can learn in schools that have solid music programs.
The American way of investment does indeed work. Rap music proved it.
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6388ec06e9aa6ab6ffd3a64e99806acf | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-09-mn-52271-story.html | Cutting-Edge Technology Opens a Window on Ancient Egyptian City | Cutting-Edge Technology Opens a Window on Ancient Egyptian City
This is a typical Nile Delta farming village, its simple mud-brick houses sitting along dirt roads amid the green carpeting of rice and corn fields.
Yet there’s grandeur here--a vast, buried metropolis from millenniums ago that was discovered by German archeologists using cutting-edge imaging technology.
The exploration team believes the site is the long-lost capital of Ramses II, a mighty pharaoh who lived more than 3,200 years ago.
Working with magnetic imaging equipment used by geophysicists to search for oil, the archeologists have mapped an underground city they estimate spread over 12 square miles.
It “is so vast and so big that there are no words to describe it,” said Edgar Pusch, head of the archeological team from the Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim, Germany. “Something like this has never been detected before in Egypt.”
The computer plottings produced by the team show winding streets, structures that look like small houses, spacious buildings, palaces and a lake shore in ghostly white lines on black.
Among the marvels are a huge stable with attached royal chariot and arms factories.
“This stable is an amazing thing,” Pusch said.
Covering nearly 185,000 square feet, the stable had six identical rows of halls connected to a vast courtyard. Each hall had 12 rooms, each 40 feet long. The floors sloped down to holes for collecting horse urine that Pusch speculates was used in dyeing cloth, softening leather and fertilizing vineyards.
Pusch said the stable held up to 460 horses, making it “the largest ever ancient stable.”
West of the stable is the chariotry, where light, two-wheeled war chariots were manufactured and maintained. Numerous reliefs on temple and tomb walls show such chariots pulled by two horses and ridden by two soldiers. Ramses II himself was depicted riding one.
An arms assembly line is nearby. Pusch’s team has dug up chariot parts, arrow shafts, flint arrowheads, javelin heads, daggers and bronze scales of body armor.
The scientists dug in only a few spots, then calculated the rest of a structure’s outlines. “If we excavated all this, we would need a lifetime,” Pusch said.
For the most part, the team relies on the magnetic images to look at the ancient city.
When small areas are excavated, they are filled back in so farming can resume. Pusch said the village cannot be quarantined as a historic site.
“What could be done is to open ‘excavation windows’ in certain very interesting areas like a villa or a house,” he said.
He also envisions a local museum to house objects dug from the site, models of the whole city and three-dimensional, computerized images reconstructing the city.
Historians know Ramses II moved ancient Egypt’s capital from the south, known as Upper Egypt, to the Nile Delta.
Pusch believes Ramses II moved the capital to Qantir to escape the powerful priests who resided in the south and also to be close to the coasts of Turkey and Syria.
“It was ideal for him and his military campaigns to have a post like this,” Pusch said.
Some statues, texts and remains of pottery had pointed to the ancient capital’s being near the cluster of villages around Qantir, about 60 miles northeast of Cairo. Qantir had been excavated on and off since the 1920s without ever before yielding much.
Rather than dig up colossal amounts of mud and disturb farming, Pusch called on Egyptian and German geophysicists to help map the grounds using an ultra-sensitive, portable cesium magnetometer. The technique is akin to looking into a person’s chest through an X-ray image, only on a much grander scale.
Transferred to computers, the readings become lines and shapes like a blueprint of a building.
Magnetic mapping has been used for oil prospecting and military uses like detecting submarines from the air, said Helmut Becker of the Bavarian State Authority for Monument Conservation.
A serious application to archeology has existed only since 1994, and the team working in Qantir is only the second such in the world after Austria-based experts, Becker added.
The technique is used in Qantir only a few days each year, depending on the availability of geophysicists. Since 1996 about 810,000 square feet have been covered, or one-15th of the total area, Pusch said.
“We need another 10 years to finish” the city center alone, he said.
Producing the magnetic images has so far cost more than $2 million, with most of the money provided by the German government.
“It gives us one of the best chances to look into everyday life of ancient Egypt in an area which has not been investigated so deeply until now,” Pusch said.
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5acde5be6de63839bf2355dc71c19219 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-11-sp-52826-story.html | As the Rams Turned | As the Rams Turned
There’s not much excitement in this town of 7,700, across Lake Pontchartrain about 45 minutes north of New Orleans. There might occasionally be a rowdy party in the ballroom at the Holiday Inn on a Saturday night, but otherwise things are quiet.
There are no big corporations with boardrooms filled with people obsessed by profit margins, and that suits Steve Rosenbloom fine.
Rosenbloom, 55, and his wife, Shelly, who have two young children, have lived in Covington since 1991. It is linked to New Orleans by the 24-mile Causeway, the world’s longest single-span bridge.
It seems an appropriate place for the son of former Los Angeles Ram owner Carroll Rosenbloom. For Steve Rosenbloom, a lot of water has gone under the bridge.
Oil is the primary business here, and Rosenbloom owns a small company, Bulk Tank Industries (BTI), which supplies containers used for storing and distributing chemicals used by oil drillers.
He likes what he does, and he likes his life.
Besides running BTI, he’s involved with three partners in a new venture, Sea-Therm, which has developed what Rosenbloom says is a revolutionary insulation for drilling equipment.
“If this goes, it’s going to be big, really big,” he said.
Like winning the Super Bowl?
“Yeah, like winning the Super Bowl, only more fun.”
The anger and bitterness over what happened more than two decades ago, when he lost his father, then lost the Rams, have long disappeared.
The Rams, some people say, should have been his team. If they were, he said, he would never have moved them away from Southern California--to St. Louis or anywhere else.
“Why would you?” he asked. “My dad made the deal for the Rams to get to a bigger market. So why would you go to a smaller market?”
Carroll Rosenbloom, a former University of Pennsylvania running back whose family had made millions in textiles, bought the Baltimore Colts in 1953. Steve, the younger of two sons, showed interest in football and by the time he was 12 was working for the Colts. He started in the locker room.
“My job was basically picking up jocks’ jocks,” he said.
It was part of a long grooming process. The assumption was that someday Steve would take over. He got a degree in business administration from Georgetown in 1967.
In 1972, Carroll Rosenbloom swapped the Colts for the Rams in a deal with Robert Irsay, who had bought the Rams from the estate of Dan Reeves. Reeves had died the previous year.
Irsay moved the Colts to Indianapolis in 1984.
The Rams moved to St. Louis in 1995.
Now, as the usually downtrodden Rams and Colts prepare for Super Bowl runs, Rosenbloom represents a bridge between the teams.
“I guess I’m the last living connection,” he said.
There are other connections too. Rosenbloom’s oldest son, J.C., was a high school teammate of Peyton Manning, the Colt quarterback. And Manning’s father, Archie, was the Saint quarterback in 1980, the one year Rosenbloom was the Saint general manager. That job brought Rosenbloom to the New Orleans area.
Rosenbloom felt he had to get out of Los Angeles.
“I got run over by a semi a few times” is how he describes his life after his father mysteriously drowned while swimming off the Florida coast north of Miami on April 2, 1979. Carroll Rosenbloom’s will left 70% of the Rams to his wife, Georgia, Steve’s stepmother, and the remaining 30% to his five children--6% for each.
Instead of inheriting a team that today is worth about half a billion dollars, Steve Rosenbloom, after much turmoil, got about $2 million for his 6%.
The will called for Steve to run the team, but Georgia, who in 1980 remarried to become Georgia Frontiere, fired him two weeks into the 1979 exhibition season.
Steve, along with Dick Steinberg, Ram director of player personnel, moved on to the Saints, where, after a 1-15 season, they resigned.
These days, Rosenbloom doesn’t even watch much football.
“I have found other things to do with my Sundays,” he said.
Asked if he was rooting for the Rams, he said, “I root for cities, and since I lived in Baltimore and Los Angeles, those are the cities I root for.”
*
Carroll Rosenbloom had three children with his first wife, Velma, now 92 and living in Margate, N.J. He had two children with Georgia, Lucia Rodriguez, 38, and Dale, 35. Lucia and her family--she has four children--live in Brentwood. Dale, a filmmaker and writer, lives with his wife and two children in West Los Angeles.
Steve’s brother Dan, 15 months older than Steve, lives in Florida and is in investment banking. Steve’s younger sister, Suzanne Irwin, died six years ago in Palm Springs at 45 after battling a crippling form of arthritis most of her life.
“She was the toughest, most courageous person I have ever known,” Rosenbloom said. “She came down with what is called juvenile arthritis when she was 10. She had 32 operations. Most people would have been in a wheelchair. She not only walked on her own, she water-skied, took part in other athletic endeavors, and danced, all against her doctors’ advice.”
She died after developing a blood clot during surgery.
Suzanne was married to Georgia’s younger brother, Ken Irwin, and they had three children.
Suzanne came to Los Angeles from Baltimore in the late 1960s to take art classes. Irwin was living in Culver City.
“My father asked Georgia’s brother to look after Suzanne and they ended up getting married,” Rosenbloom said.
They later moved to Palm Springs and opened the La Mancha Resort, which Irwin still owns.
Rosenbloom’s only contact with Georgia since they parted company in 1979 was at Suzanne’s funeral. And, yes, they did speak.
“It wasn’t a long conversation,” Rosenbloom said with a smile.
But Dale Rosenbloom, who was also there, said the two hugged, there were some tears and they were together when the whole family had breakfast.
“I was hoping it was the start of a better relationship,” Dale Rosenbloom said.
It wasn’t, but Steve, Dale and Lucia have since become closer.
“The older you get, the more you realize life is too short to have feuds and built-up anger, particularly with family members,” Steve said. “You’ve got to look ahead and not back. I would like to have an even closer relationship with Chip [Dale’s nickname] and Lucia. They never did anything to me, and they are my half-brother and sister.”
Said Dale, “I could never say anything bad about Steve. I consider him my brother, and I love him as a brother. I’m also extremely close to my mother. I think they’re both good people.”
*
The rift between Steve and Georgia was a long time developing.
According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other publications, Georgia was Carroll’s mistress for nine years. When they were married in 1966, Carroll became Georgia’s sixth husband.
Velma never knew of the affair until she was told by a friend. She filed for divorce not long afterward, and Carroll and Georgia were married nine days after the divorce became final.
Carroll and Georgia met at a dinner party at Joseph Kennedy’s mansion in Palm Beach, Fla., in 1957. Carroll Rosenbloom was a major contributor to the Kennedy political machine.
When they met, Carroll was 57, Georgia 30.
Said Dale Rosenbloom, “My mom and dad had a great marriage. She adored him and he adored her, and they were very devoted to each other. Even Steve has said my mom gave our father 22 great years.”
Georgia divorced her seventh and last husband, Dominic Frontiere, in 1988, not long after he had spent nine months in prison. He had pleaded guilty to tax evasion for his involvement in a ticket-scalping scheme involving the 1980 Super Bowl, in which the Rams played the Pittsburgh Steelers at the Rose Bowl.
Requests made through the Rams to interview Georgia for this story were turned down.
Georgia, on the surface at least, was not the type of woman a son would embrace as a companion for his father. Making matters worse was that Georgia and Steve’s first wife, Renee, did not get along. Renee would openly criticize Georgia to anyone who would listen.
Steve and Renee, after having two sons, J.C., now 24, and Skylar, 21, were divorced not long after Steve left the Saints.
His current wife, Shelly, came into his life soon after that. She was managing her aunt’s restaurant in New Orleans, and they met through a mutual friend. Typically, Rosenbloom never mentioned his background to Shelly.
“I told a friend I was dating someone named Steve Rosenbloom,” Shelly said. “The friend asked if that was the Steve Rosenbloom who was involved with the Rams. I said no because, I thought, he surely would have said something.”
Rosenbloom and Shelly were married in 1985. When they moved to Covington in 1991, they lived in a remote area. Last July, with children Jonathan, 13, and Sarah, 4, they moved into a new home in a wooded area only a few miles southwest of town. It’s a 6,800 square-foot, five-bedroom home.
“I couldn’t afford this kind of home in L.A.,” Rosenbloom said.
Last summer, Jonathan became ill with an infection and spent 11 days in a hospital.
“It was serious, very serious, before he came out of it,” Rosenbloom said. “Chip called to ask if there was anything he could do and express his love and concern, which was terrific.”
Said Dale, “I was very concerned, and I wanted Steve to know.”
Said Steve, “I hope the relationship with Chip and Lucia continues to improve.”
And what about Georgia?
“You trying to put me on the spot?” Steve said with a smile. “You know, she’s never tried to contact me, but then I’ve never tried to contact her either.”
It’s understandable if this bridge is a tough one to cross.
*
Tony Capozzolla, a lawyer who at one time represented former Ram coach George Allen, was a friend of Steve Rosenbloom. He took an interest when he learned Carroll had drowned, and investigated both the drowning and the will.
“There was a draft of a will that left the team to Steve,” Capozzolla said the other day. “The problem was, it hadn’t been executed.
“If Carroll had died a few months later, Steve would have inherited the team. He would have been the greatest owner in the world.”
Said Rosenbloom, “My father would change his will every few years. It just so happened he drowned when the one that left 70% of the team to Georgia was in effect.
“My father left most of the team to his wife because of the widow’s tax exception. He didn’t want to give all his money to Uncle Sam. But I can’t imagine he meant for her to run the team.”
No, that was supposed to be Steve Rosenbloom’s job. He was the team’s executive vice president.
The will also named Hugh Culverhouse, the original owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers who died in 1994, as co-executor. Ed Hookstratten, Carroll’s Ram attorney, was named the other co-executor.
Hookstratten said he doesn’t believe there was ever a draft of any will leaving the team to Steve.
“Carroll always wanted to leave the team to Georgia,” Hookstratten said.
Others close to Carroll at the time support Hookstratten’s claim.
Of the draft Capozzolla mentioned, Steve said: “I’ve heard about it, but I never actually saw it. But it’s irrelevant because it wasn’t in effect. As I said, C.R. [Carroll] was always changing his will.”
Hookstratten said Carroll wanted Tex Schramm, the longtime Dallas Cowboy president, to come in and run the Rams and offered Schramm the presidency six months before he died. Schramm turned him down.
So how did Culverhouse, who later became an advisor to Georgia, end up as the co-executor of the will?
Steve Rosenbloom said his father needed Culverhouse on his side because he was the chairman of the NFL finance committee, and could sway decisions beneficial to the Rams, particularly since they were in the middle of a move from the Coliseum to Anaheim.
“Culverhouse did everything he could to try and screw the children,” Steve said. “It was Jerry Buss who helped us out. Figuring he wanted to get his foot in the door as a minority owner of the Rams, he made me an offer for my 6%. That made Culverhouse more responsible; he couldn’t just put the kids under a rock.
“At the time, Culverhouse said, ‘There goes that Steve, just looking out for himself.’ But that wasn’t the case at all. I was looking out for my brother and sister, and my half-brother and sister as well.”
Rosenbloom said his father and Culverhouse at one time were adversaries.
“Culverhouse wanted to buy the Rams at the time my dad made the deal with Irsay. He was going to sue until my dad met with him.”
Don Klosterman, Carroll Rosenbloom’s general manager for two years in Baltimore and later with the Rams, said, “They met in Dallas. I remember that well. Carroll and Culverhouse later became friends.”
Klosterman was fired by Georgia after the 1980 season.
“I’ve chosen to look back on my days with the Rams and just remember the good times and block out the bad,” he said.
Klosterman does have one regret, though. Culverhouse wanted to hire him as general manager of the Buccaneers when he started the team in 1976, and offered a package that included 10% ownership of the team.
“I stayed with the Rams because Carroll told me I had a lifetime contract,” Klosterman said. “Unfortunately, it was his lifetime, not mine.”
*
Rosenbloom would not discuss his father’s drowning on the record, nor would Capozzolla.
A television news program, PBS’ “Frontline,” in a series hosted by Jessica Savitch, once offered evidence that Rosenbloom was not drowned by riptides, as officials said, but was killed by an electric shock from a diver a witness from Canada saw in the ocean.
No charges were filed, though.
A small funeral was held in Florida, then Georgia put on a wake at the Bel-Air estate she and Carroll had shared. There was a stand-up act by Jonathan Winters, and among the guests were Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton and Ricardo Montalban.
“It was Georgia’s coming-out party,” Steve Rosenbloom said at the time.
Renee Rosenbloom was quoted as saying, “It was the only funeral that could have played eight weeks in Las Vegas.”
*
Steve Rosenbloom, during his days as the Ram executive vice president, was popular among players, reporters, team owners and executives.
“Steve wasn’t like you’d envision an owner’s son to be,” said former Ram quarterback Pat Haden. “There was a lot of depth to Steve. He could talk about anything. He was intelligent, had a quiet confidence and was retrospective.
“All the players liked him and respected him.
“What I remember most about Steve is one time in Philadelphia, I believe, our bus driver got lost and Steve made him get out of the seat and he drove the bus.
“Steve did a little bit of everything.”
If there was one person who had a strained relationship with the boss’ son, it was Klosterman.
“We got along great in Baltimore, but after Carroll made the deal for the Rams, he initially had Steve stay back in Baltimore and brought me out to run the Rams,” Klosterman said. “That put stress on our relationship. But I always respected Steve. He always had a good heart.”
Rosenbloom these days is still looking out for his relatives. Three of Shelly’s brothers work for him. Shelly’s sister, Tammy, is married to John Gerlach, the son of Steve’s close friend, Stan Gerlach.
Said Rosenbloom, reflectively, “I guess my life really has been a soap opera.”
NFC PLAYOFFS
Washington at Tampa Bay
Saturday, 1:15 p.m., Channel 11
*
Minnesota at St. Louis
Sunday, 9:30 a.m., Channel 11
*
AFC PLAYOFFS
Miami at Jacksonville
Saturday, 9:30 a.m., Channel 2
*
Tennessee at Indianapolis
Sunday, 1 p.m., Channel 2
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25a6a6a2bd2f4cda5914f1cbc8470a67 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-12-mn-53274-story.html | The KGB Rises Again in Russia | The KGB Rises Again in Russia
Top officials of Russia’s secret police, known these days as the FSB, gathered last month to celebrate the founding of their agency in 1917 by Communist leader V.I. Lenin.
Vladimir V. Putin, an ex-KGB colonel who had become prime minister only months earlier, spoke to his compatriots and reported with a smile: “A group of FSB colleagues dispatched to work undercover in the government has successfully completed its first mission.”
Putin, referring to his own rapid rise within Russia’s power structure, meant to be funny. But less than two weeks later, when he unexpectedly became the nation’s acting president, there were many who didn’t take it as a joke.
“The KGB has risen from the ashes and come to power in Russia,” said Sergei I. Grigoryants, a human rights activist arrested twice in the 1970s and ‘80s by the KGB and imprisoned for nine years for publishing anti-Soviet literature. “It is the logical outcome of the process that has been unfolding for the past decade.”
Putin’s appointment as acting president upon the resignation Dec. 31 of President Boris N. Yeltsin symbolizes the resurgence of the secret police agency long feared for its role in killing millions of people during the reign of dictator Josef Stalin. Known in that era as the NKVD and renamed the KGB in 1954, its activities included repressing dissidents, assassinating enemies and controlling the thoughts of ordinary citizens.
During the Yeltsin era, the KGB was broken up into smaller agencies and its main department was recast as the FSB, short for Federal Security Service. Biding its time, the FSB played a more subtle role, gathering strength and information while infiltrating businesses, government agencies and other institutions of the changing society. In 1998, Yeltsin named Putin to head the FSB, then appointed him prime minister in August.
Now, instead of the democratic transfer of power that many had envisioned would take place this summer, the former FSB chief has stepped into the vacuum of power in the Kremlin and taken charge of the country. With the backing of wealthy power brokers who control most of Russia’s media, he is expected to win the presidency in a special election March 26.
Putin, whose popularity stems from his nationalist message and his war in the separatist republic of Chechnya, embodies the KGB spirit, but he doesn’t publicly embrace Communist ideology. He has promised not to seize the property of Yeltsin cronies, known as “The Family,” who profited immensely from the corrupt privatization of the 1990s. The Communist Party plans to run its own candidate, Gennady A. Zyuganov, against him in the March election.
Ex-Colleagues in KGB Gain Key Posts
Since becoming acting president, Putin has moved former KGB colleagues into top posts in his administration. “Putin’s appointment is the culmination of the KGB’s crusade for power,” said Konstantin N. Borovoi, an outgoing independent deputy in the Duma, the lower house of parliament. “This is its finale. Now the KGB runs the country.”
Many Russians wonder what link remains between Putin and the agency where he spent most of his professional life. Some worry that the country will return to the repressive methods used to control the public in Soviet times. Others hail him as a skilled operative whose training and experience as a KGB agent mark him as the creme de la creme of Russian society.
Putin has said he resigned from the KGB in 1991, about the time he took a job in the city government of Leningrad, since renamed St. Petersburg. But some who know the KGB--loyal former officers as well as victims of its persecution--question whether Putin retired. They suggest that his role was to infiltrate local government in a city with a budding pro-capitalist movement.
“It is quite possible that he continued to work unofficially for the service,” said retired Col. Igor N. Prelin, a 30-year KGB veteran who now writes novels. “One can change a job, but it is impossible to change one’s heart.”
Retired navy Capt. Alexander Nikitin, acquitted Dec. 29 of espionage charges pursued by the FSB, put it this way: “There are no ex-KGB officers, just as there are no ex-German shepherds.”
Putin joined the KGB in 1975, the year the agency began a campaign to discredit Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei D. Sakharov before sending the dissident into exile in Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, about 250 miles east of Moscow. A year earlier, the KGB had forced author and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in literature Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn into exile abroad.
Putin had just received a law degree and, like others recruited by the KGB, was among the best and the brightest of Soviet society. As an agent, he received the highest level of training as well as perks reserved for the Communist elite--housing, food and travel opportunities unavailable to ordinary citizens.
Putin’s activities over the next 15 years remain murky. He was stationed at least some of the time in East Germany, the front line of confrontation with the West. Various accounts say he recruited agents, monitored East German contact with Westerners, oversaw the East German Stasi secret police and fraternized with West German politicians.
According to Stratfor--an Internet service based in Austin, Texas, that provides intelligence reports to corporate customers and offers a Web site, https://www.stratfor.com--Putin’s most important mission was to help steal technology from the West and prevent the Soviet Union from losing the Cold War.
By the mid-1980s, Soviet leaders knew that they were falling behind the West. Stratfor and author Yevgenia Albats, in her 1994 book, “KGB: State Within a State,” contend that perestroika--the opening up of society under Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev--was part of a KGB plan to catch up with Western technology by expanding trade relations. The KGB, preparing for a new era of business, began shipping Soviet wealth abroad, foreshadowing the widespread corruption of the Yeltsin years.
By 1986, “KGB operatives began to funnel state and party resources out of the Soviet Union through KGB residencies in foreign countries, with the initial intent of cycling this cash back through the new banks and joint ventures,” according to a report on the Stratfor Web site. “Putin’s position with the KGB placed him at the heart of these theft-for-hard-currency schemes.”
Around 1989, Putin returned to Leningrad, where he had attended university. According to Stratfor, the evidence strongly suggests that Putin remained a KGB agent and monitored the city’s active pro-capitalist movement that later would help drive much of Yeltsin’s economic program.
Putin rose to become Leningrad’s deputy mayor and is often credited with running the city, earning the nickname “Stasi,” after the East German police.
In a 1998 newspaper interview, Putin explained his decision to resign from the KGB in 1991: “It was the time of confrontation between the Russian and federal authorities, and I was aware that nobody was interested in me,” he said. Nevertheless, “I was surprised by the ease with which I was allowed to leave,” he said.
Leonid V. Shebarshin, who was vice chairman of the KGB from 1989 to ’91, said it is entirely possible that the agency had “sanctioned” Putin’s entrance into Leningrad’s city government.
“What Putin was doing in his work in the Leningrad administration naturally was of some interest to the service,” he said in an interview. “The service was interested in having its own man in the administration. This is quite obvious, although the service had never set out to watch how the reform movement was developing.”
With the breakup of the KGB into smaller organizations after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, its agents burrowed into the new system. Many took advantage of a new reserve status offered to agents, allowing them to officially retire while maintaining ties with the organization.
Because of their high level of training, discipline and knowledge, they were very marketable. Many received top jobs in banks, private enterprises, government agencies and, in a few cases, organized crime groups. Some could offer protection from the authorities as well as dirt on rivals culled from the KGB’s vast archives.
“Like cockroaches spreading from a squalid apartment to the rest of the building, they have eventually gained a firm foothold everywhere,” said Grigoryants, president of the Glasnost human rights foundation. “They meet their ex-colleagues at every turn: in parliament, in the Kremlin administration, in the government.”
Putin came full circle when Yeltsin appointed him to head the FSB in the summer of 1998. He purged some agents but did not change the agency’s course.
He continued, for example, the FSB’s persecution of two environmental activists, Nikitin and navy Capt. Grigory Pasko, who had been charged with espionage in separate cases for exposing nuclear pollution by the navy. Both were subsequently acquitted of treason, though Pasko was convicted on a lesser charge.
Putin also moved to monitor e-mail and other Internet communications by requiring providers to install equipment linking their computers with FSB headquarters. Putin said the FSB was not “going to establish control over the Internet” but wanted to “prevent the potential enemy from freely accessing classified information.” Critics say the technology could allow the FSB to read, block or alter private communications without the knowledge of the sender or recipient.
The emergence of a onetime KGB colonel as acting president strikes fear in the hearts of many, in part because the agency has never renounced its brutal past. There have been no Nuremberg trials, as were held in postwar Nazi Germany; no Truth Commission, like the panel that reviewed the sins of the apartheid era in South Africa. Former KGB agents have not been prosecuted in Russia for their part in mass deportations, as they have in the now-independent Baltic nations. Except in unusual instances, KGB archives housing evidence of the agency’s crimes remain closed to outsiders.
Training Is Said to Produce Loyal Agents
There are some, however, who say the choice of Putin is an acknowledgment of the exemplary kind of person the KGB produced.
The high level of training turned out agents who “have always been the most reliable, trustworthy and loyal people in the country,” said Prelin, the KGB colonel-turned-novelist. They know how to execute orders quickly and efficiently and do not need to be told what to do twice, he said.
“The accession of the KGB to power will mean that, finally, some honest and responsible people will take over the country,” Prelin said. “These people have a sense of responsibility. They are as good as their word. They will always serve their motherland first.”
Borovoi, who lost his Duma seat in Dec. 19 elections, takes a much darker view. He contends that ideology is irrelevant to Putin and his close circle of former KGB advisors; they are motivated solely by their desire to control society in the tradition of Russian czars and Soviet dictators, he says.
“The final aim of this community is to gain maximum power and influence,” Borovoi said. “They will never get enough. Their ultimate goal is to separate Russia from the rest of the world with an Iron Curtain and rule undividedly in every sphere of public life. It is only through the isolation of Russia that they can gain absolute power.”
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99ed85bf35ad5ecae6a656f1cd7a522e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-28-ca-58439-story.html | ‘The Cup’ Is a Rich Mix of Soccer, Life in Monastery | ‘The Cup’ Is a Rich Mix of Soccer, Life in Monastery
What could be more surprising than “The Cup”? Not only is its country of origin unexpected (the East Asian kingdom of Bhutan not being previously known as a filmmaking center), so was its becoming the object of a mini-bidding war among independent distributors after its successful debut at the Directors Fortnight in Cannes.
Set in a Tibetan exile monastery, starring Tibetan monks and written and directed by a man described as “one of the most important incarnate lamas in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition,” “The Cup,” in fact the first feature ever made in Bhutan, is also surprising in its subject matter. Charming, slyly comic and far from conventionally religious, it shows what happens when, of all things, an intense case of World Cup fever infects a holy sanctuary.
Make no mistake, the monks in “The Cup” (filmed in Bhutan’s Chokling Monastery) are the real deal, genuine prayer-chanting, horn-blowing, gong-sounding, big hat-wearing, butter tea-drinking individuals who have made a decision to “take refuge in the Buddha.”
Based on a true story and written and directed at a leisurely pace by Khyentse Norbu, “The Cup” takes its time immersing viewers in the monastery’s world, allowing us to experience the slow rhythms of the place’s daily life.
Everything that happens, down to the way the monks wear their robes (“It’s a 2,500-year-old fashion,” one of them cracks), is steeped in the most ancient custom. But there is a place for playfulness as well as ritual, because even monks engage in food fights and general horsing around when young.
Just being a monk is different in this modern age, especially in a country in which the modernizing influence of India is very strong. Young monks are more worldly than their elders were at their time of life, and that creates the kind of push-pull between tradition and modernity that is at the center of “The Cup’s” appeal.
Making the monastery an especially intriguing place is filmmaker Norbu’s genial and unforced feeling for character. Everyone in the institution, from Geko the tireless disciplinarian to a deranged soothsayer who never washes his hair to the wry old abbot who longs to return to Tibet but fears it will never happen, is well defined in a way that helps fuel the story and is appealing in its own right.
Shot in a straightforward style by Paul Warren, “The Cup” has a neo-documentary feel that was enhanced by the way it was made. Having written his script in English for a non-English-speaking nonprofessional cast, Norbu briefed the actors on what they should be doing before each scene. “Dialogue was prompted and memorized on the spot,” the press notes inform, “and most scenes were completed within three takes or less--a testament to the actors’ monastic discipline and concentration.”
Lama Chonjor, the real-life abbot of Chokling Monastery, plays himself as an otherworldy type who is especially worried about a pair of young Tibetans who, a letter from a family member informs him, are attempting to sneak across the border and join his religious order.
The abbot confides his worries to his major-domo, the monastery’s hard-line Geko (played by Orgyen Tobgyal, a major lama in his own right), but this stern upholder of tradition has other things on his mind. It’s 1998, the World Cup is going on and the young monks have little else on their minds.
Most soccer-mad of all is 14-year-old Orgyen (Jamyang Lodro, Tobgyal’s real-life son). A relentless live-wire, Orgyen lives and breathes the World Cup, but with a Tibetan twist. His favorite player is Reynaldo (whose No. 9 jersey he wears under his robes), in part because the Brazilian’s head is shaved like a monk’s, and his favorite country is France because it’s the only nation to have spoken out for Tibetan rights.
A miniature hustler always looking for an angle, Orgyen will let nothing stand in the way of his watching the Cup games, while Geko is equally determined to uphold the monastery’s discipline. What happens when this miniature unstoppable force meets an apparently immovable object over the Cup final is the film’s charming centerpiece.
“The Cup” is not in a hurry to tell its story, but it wouldn’t be effective if it was. When the incongruity of World Cup soccer (“Two civilized nations fighting over a ball” is how Geko bemusedly describes it to the abbot) is joined to the incongruity of sports-crazed monks, the slow buildup creates wonders all its own.
* MPAA rating: G. Times guidelines: nothing objectionable.
‘The Cup’
Orgyen Tobgyal: Geko
Neten Chokling: Lodo
Jamyang Lodro: Orgyen
Lama Chonjor: Abbot
Godu Lama: Old Lama
Robbie Coltrane: Charlie
Released by Fine Line Features. Director Khyentse Norbu. Producers Malcolm Watson, Raymond Steiner. Executive producers Hooman Majd, Jeremy Thomas. Screenplay Khyentse Norbu. Cinematographer Paul Warren. Editor John Scott. Production design Raymond Steiner. Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes.
In limited release.
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e167f65b7eb4795a5caa81e39a5decce | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-29-hm-58817-story.html | Weather Is the Key to Good Gardenias | Weather Is the Key to Good Gardenias
Question: My gardenias never look as good as my friend’s. What is the secret to growing healthy gardenias?
C.D., Orange
Answer: Although fragrant gardenias are quite common in Southern California and can thrive here, they can be temperamental to grow if they are planted in the wrong spot.
To do well, they require heat during the day and cool nights. They should, therefore, be planted in a full sun location (except for in the hottest inland areas) that is warm during the day and cool at night.
Good locations are under the open sky and away from the house. Avoid planting close to house walls or in patio areas, because these locations tend to stay warmer at night.
When growing gardenias, you are somewhat at the mercy of the weather. In winter when soil temperatures drop below 62 degrees, they tend to experience chlorosis (yellow leaves with green veins).
Chlorosis occurs because the plant is unable to take up iron from the cold soil. If the condition is extreme, the leaves may all fall off.
You can fertilize with a ferrous sulfate or iron chelating agent to help remedy this problem, but the plant generally won’t be able to take up the iron until the weather warms in spring. Check with a California certified nursery professional regarding which iron products are best for gardenias.
Also keep in mind that fluctuations in nighttime temperatures--such as what we have experienced this winter--can affect flowering.
Although gardenias need daytime heat, if the nighttime temperatures are warm and exceed 60 to 62 degrees, the buds may form, but not develop. Then if we suddenly get a few cooler nights, the buds may drop off.
Gardenias prefer good drainage, regular watering and acidic soil.
Plant them high as you would azaleas to augment drainage and give them sufficient room so that they aren’t crowded by other plants or competing roots. They don’t tolerate going dry, so keep them evenly moist. Mulch well around the plant with an azalea/camellia mix, which will preserve moisture and acidify the soil.
Fertilize several times during the growing season beginning in spring with an acidic type fertilizer that contains an ammonium type of nitrogen such as ammonium sulfate, ammonium nitrate or urea. Also periodically fertilize with iron to prevent chlorosis.
After blooming, gardenias may be pruned to remove spent flowers and control straggly growth.
Gardenias benefit from morning dew or misting. If conditions aren’t moist enough, they are likely to be plagued by whiteflies, aphids and other sucking insects like thrips.
Gardenia Choices
There are numerous varieties of gardenias to choose from:
* ‘Mystery’ is probably the best-known variety. It has double white blooms on a 6- to 8-foot bush and blooms May through July. It becomes rangy without pruning.
* ‘August Beauty’ reaches 4 to 6 feet tall and has double blooms May through November.
* ‘First Love’ has larger blooms than ‘Mystery.’ Some feel its deeper green leaves are less likely to yellow.
* ‘Daisy’ has single blooms on a compact 3-foot-tall plant.
* ‘Golden Magic’ has full white flowers that age to a deep golden yellow on a 3-foot-tall plant. Blooms April to September.
* ‘Kimura Shikazaki’ (‘Four Seasons’) is a compact 2- to 3-foot-tall plant with a long bloom season from spring through fall.
* ‘Radicans’ grows just 6 to 12 inches tall with a 2- to 3-foot spread and 1-inch blooms in summer. It makes a good ground cover or container plant.
* ‘Veitchii’ is a compact 3- to 4-foot-tall gardenia with prolific blooms May through November.
Have a problem in your yard? University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE) Master Gardeners are here to help. These trained and certified horticultural volunteers are dedicated to extending research-based, scientifically accurate information to the public about home horticulture and pest management. They are involved with a variety of outreach programs, including the UCCE Master Garden hotline, which provides answers to specific questions. You can reach the hotline at (714) 708-1646 or send e-mail to ucmastergardeners@yahoo.com. Calls and e-mail are picked up daily and are generally returned within two to three days.
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9a52dc50bc7572e8ec87923a677d32a4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-31-cl-59476-story.html | Couples’ Emotional Bonding Can Take the Steam Out of Intimacy | Couples’ Emotional Bonding Can Take the Steam Out of Intimacy
“What does a lesbian bring on a second date?” asks stand-up comic, and Broadway actress Lea DeLaria, who often bases jokes on her experience as a gay woman. “A U-Haul.”
That’s because on the first date, she says, they fall madly in love. On the second, they move in. Six months later, they stop having sex.
Some comics have called this phenomenon “lesbian bed death.” While the phrase is politically incorrect in the extreme, many lesbians report that their experiences bear out the stereotype.
“It happens all the time,” said a 34-year-old Santa Monica lesbian who claims the no-sex lament is a regular topic among gay couples she knows. “I have friends who didn’t have sex for 10 years. When two women are together, you start to merge and become like sisters. It just becomes a little sisterhood.”
The dwindling libidos of lesbian couples is supported by studies that show they have sex less frequently than heterosexual or homosexual male couples. “Lesbian couples started out having sex less [often] than gay male couples, heterosexual married couples and heterosexual cohabitants,” said Pepper Schwartz, a University of Washington sociologist and co-author of an eight-year study (1983-1991) that compared the intimacy of 12,000 people, including lesbian, homosexual and heterosexual couples. “And at every stage of the relationship, they [lesbians] had less sex.”
*
Theories abound as to why, and about how the road to sexual estrangement is different from that experienced by other kinds of couples.
Schwartz chalks it up to basic man-woman differences. Women are socially trained to wait for partners to initiate sex (many lesbians in Schwartz’s study reported not liking “always initiating sex”), so each woman may be waiting for the other to make a move.
For heterosexual couples, where there may be discord or distance, said Schwartz, sex is often a bridge to intimacy.
But there may be no need for a bridge to intimacy in lesbian relationships because, as DeLaria noted, “a lesbian couple is so busy emoting and emoting that no one is thinking about sex.” Their comparatively less libidinous life may have to do with the way women bond (read: by emoting) as compared with the way women bond with men (i.e., through sex).
*
“A lot of women get intimacy without [sex],” said JoAnn Loulan, a lesbian and sex therapist in Portola, Calif., who recommends to gay women couples that they schedule sex, just as many therapists suggest to heterosexual couples with diminishing sex lives. “What drives lesbians’ sexual relationships is love,” said Loulan. “In a lesbian relationship, you can have that love filled up by going to the kids’ soccer game together or by snuggling, holding hands or by having a deep conversation.”
But as DeLaria put it: “To have ‘lesbian bed death,’ you both have to be dead.” Which is to say, the person whose sex drive is still alive and kicking stands a chance at reviving her lover’s.
And even if incompatibility leads to a breakup, said DeLaria, that doesn’t mean the relationship is over: “Lesbians always keep their exes with them until death because they have created this emotional bond, and they can’t let go of it. But pretty soon, you can create your own softball team.”
Birds & Bees is a weekly column on relationships and sexuality. Kathleen Kelleher can be reached via e-mail at kellehr@gte.net.
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5b48cc0a0f20e8583b2b697800b3df2c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-31-fi-59503-story.html | Hedy Lamarr’s Invention Finally Comes of Age | Hedy Lamarr’s Invention Finally Comes of Age
The obituaries for movie actress Hedy Lamarr, who died at her home in Florida on Jan. 19 at age 86, all mentioned the fact that she co-invented an important technology for radio communications called “frequency hopping.” But none of the obituaries described the significance of her invention for current and emerging technologies, or the fact that her intellectual breakthrough will fuel the next great boom in Internet use.
What was called “frequency hopping” in the 1940s, when Lamarr and her friend George Antheil developed the idea, is now generally called “spread spectrum” wireless communication. Looking around my house, I can see that it’s rapidly filling up with spread spectrum devices dependent on Lamarr’s and Antheil’s innovation.
There are my cordless and wireless phones, for example. Just about every digital wireless phone uses a version of spread spectrum techniques. For Christmas I got a hand-held global positioning satellite device, a little box that tells me exactly where I am; GPS uses spread spectrum too.
I expect to be using a lot more spread spectrum tools in the future. Dale Hatfield, director of the Office of Engineering and Technology of the Federal Communications Commission, told me last week, “Spread spectrum appears to be the technology of choice for the next generation of mobile data devices.” As everyone knows by now, wireless is where everything related to the Internet is headed.
If Lamarr had been able to retain her patent rights, she would possibly have become the richest person of all time. But she struggled with finances for most of her later years--she was even arrested for shoplifting twice. Her story highlights the weird tragedies of the patent system when an inventor develops an idea decades ahead of its time.
The tale of Lamarr’s technical contributions is familiar to many engineers, but largely unknown among the general public. It’s possibly the oddest and most ironic story in recent technological history.
Hedy Lamarr was born as Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna in 1913, and she was famous before she left her teens because of a scandalous nude scene in her first movie, the Czech film “Ecstasy,” released in 1932. She married a wealthy Austrian industrialist, Fritz Mandl, when she was 19. Mandl was so jealous of her beauty that he tried to prevent her from leaving the house, which meant that Hedy sat through many dinner conversations and some technical meetings where she apparently absorbed a remarkably advanced education in radio technology.
Lamarr eventually escaped this loveless marriage and made her way to London, where she was discovered by Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM. Mayer brought her to Hollywood, installed her in his stable of studio actors and billed her as “the most beautiful woman in movies.”
Lamarr met George Antheil at a Hollywood party. He was an equally unlikely candidate for technical innovation--he was a pioneer in avant-garde music in the 1930s, and his specialty was composing mechanistic pieces for player pianos.
Lamarr explained her ideas to Antheil about developing a method for communications that could not be intercepted or jammed, by “hopping” radio signals over different frequencies. Antheil provided the mechanical means to do this by using his knowledge of player pianos. Their invention used a paper tape, like player piano rolls, to synchronize radio communications that would jump from one frequency to another. They shared the patent for this device in 1942.
Lamarr’s and Antheil’s invention was not used by the military until 1962, when it helped secure communications between ships involved in the Cuban missile crisis. By then, their patent had expired. Patents last only 17 years. Even though Lamarr’s work became crucial to military communications through the most intense period of the Cold War--eventually embedded in the country’s entire nuclear command and control system--she never made any money from her technical work, nor did Antheil.
Throughout the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, spread spectrum technologies were highly classified and available only for military applications.
But in 1985, the Federal Communications Commission began to relax its rules, and spread spectrum was opened for commercial development. The first applications were for commercial satellite services, but the technology quickly became the bedrock for mobile telephones. Qualcomm, for example, the booming San Diego-based mobile telephone company, was built on spread spectrum applications.
In recent years the FCC has released segments of the radio bandwidth for unlicensed radio communication, and this bandwidth is being used by spread spectrum applications. Spread spectrum radio communication has the advantages of getting more digital bits into a segment of radio bandwidth, of reducing device interference, and increasing security. Without this innovation, wireless phone users would be talking to and hearing each other without wanting to, or else the number of phone users in a given area would be very limited. Think about all the cell phones in Los Angeles, and thank Hedy Lamarr.
There is a handy match between the way spread spectrum works and the way the Internet works, because Internet data packets can be “hopped” over many frequencies and reassembled at their destination, providing very fast data transmission rates. Cisco Systems, the giant Internet routing company, already offers a fixed wireless, point-to-point spread spectrum network connection at 45 million bits per second.
The real promise of spread spectrum technologies is in rural areas, neighborhoods, schools and Third World countries, where relatively inexpensive wireless devices can substitute for expensive ground wire networks.
Wireless Internet activist Dave Hughes of Colorado Springs, Colo., has used spread spectrum networks to connect people in the jungles of Puerto Rico, in the remote woods of Wisconsin and Montana, and in the plains of Mongolia. A presentation Hughes gave in Austin, Texas, in 1998 led to a change in the state’s Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund, the country’s largest public fund for wiring communities. Now rural Texas towns can apply for grants to network their communities with spread spectrum wireless devices.
Hughes successfully lobbied for Hedy Lamarr to be honored with a special “Pioneer Award” from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997.
Lamarr also reportedly took some comfort in her knowledge that she had produced an idea of great use to people all over the world. She did live long enough to understand the impact of her invention. As Dale Hatfield said, her invention was a “fundamental breakthrough.”
Hedy Lamarr once said, with some ironic bitterness, “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” She was glamorous, all right, but she was anything but stupid.
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1627a0411fcbcf4b01f8603b2a8e0b81 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jul-02-me-46893-story.html | Raids, Not Race, Were What Mattered to Black Pirates | Raids, Not Race, Were What Mattered to Black Pirates
Pirates have gone down in history as drunken, bloodthirsty terrors of the high seas who wouldn’t think twice about slicing off a captive’s ear or sending him down the plank.
But historians are taking a new look at the seafaring thieves and finding that their ships may have been one of the earliest places in modern society where blacks attained equality with whites. Despite slavery on the mainland, black pirates on the ocean had the right to vote, could bear arms, got an equal share of the booty and were even elected captains of predominantly white crews.
“The deck of a pirate ship was the most empowering place for blacks within the 18th century white man’s world,” said Kenneth Kinkor, project historian at Expedition Whydah, a museum on Cape Cod that houses artifacts from the first documented pirate ship discovered in the world.
Pirates even raided slave ships and plantations and gave blacks a chance for freedom by joining them, said Kinkor, who contends pirate brutality has been exaggerated by Hollywood movies and popular lore.
Historians are divided over the black pirate theory. W. Jeffrey Bolster of the University of New Hampshire, for instance, acknowledged that black pirates enjoyed some privileges: One was Capt. Kidd’s quartermaster, and several belonged to Blackbeard’s crew.
But Bolster also said many pirates were psychopathic criminals who “happily raped captive African women” and kept black slaves on board to do the most onerous jobs.
“For us to say these white pirates always accepted the black men as equals is nonsense,” Bolster said.
Others, such as historian Marcus Rediker of the University of Pittsburgh, insist pirates practiced a type of democracy revolutionary for the times--nearly two centuries before slavery ended in the United States.
They say buccaneers voted on all major decisions, elected their leaders, split their booty fairly and established workman’s compensation for injured pirates and the families of pirates killed on the job.
Pirates’ democratic ways extended to blacks, who could escape slavery and rise to command a ship or an entire fleet, said Rediker, author of the 1987 book “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.”
“They could either be a law-abiding slave or an escaped convict or a pirate with a chance at the golden ring,” said marine explorer Barry Clifford.
Clifford is the finder of what are believed to be the only pirate ships in the world discovered to date: the Whydah off Cape Cod in 1984, two pirate ships off Venezuela in 1998 and what he believes is Capt. Kidd’s ship off the African island of Madagascar last January.
On Madagascar’s tiny Ste. Marie isle, where Kidd’s ship apparently sank, pirates brought their “floating democracies” to land, said Clifford, establishing a community in about 1680 governed by a constitution that included the right to be free regardless of color.
“It sounds almost like Abraham Lincoln plagiarized it,” said Clifford, coauthor of the 1999 book “Expedition Whydah.”
The untold story of black pirates is emerging partly through the discovery of the sunken ships, which is being made possible with new technology such as camera-carrying robots that allowed scientists to find the Titanic. The Whydah, for instance, yielded rare African gold jewelry that had been hacked apart so it could be divided fairly, said Kinkor, who works with Clifford.
Kinkor and others also base their findings on new research into statements of people imprisoned by buccaneers as well as trials and testimony of pirates, including members of the crews of Blackbeard, Capt. Kidd, Black Bart and the Whydah.
Even Kinkor and Rediker don’t think pirates treated blacks as equals solely out of a grand vision of social justice. They say it also grew out of pragmatism: Pirates needed competent, hard-working deck hands, regardless of skin color.
The “Golden Age of Piracy” lasted from 1680 to 1725, with at least 10,000 pirates roaming the seas at its height, Kinkor said. At least one-third of them were black, he said.
Arguably the most “successful” pirate ever was Laurens de Graf, who was one of the buccaneers most feared by the Spanish and who led a fleet that peaked at 2,000 men, Kinkor said. De Graf eventually was pardoned by the French, given a minor title of French nobility and helped found Biloxi, Miss.
In history books De Graf is described as tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed and white. In reality he was black, an escaped slave originally from Holland, Kinkor said. Historians lied about his color because they feared he might inspire other slaves to revolt.
“Historians did not want people to know De Graf was black. The thought of a black uprising was the most frightening thing in colonial America,” said maritime historian James Nelson of Harpswell, Maine.
De Graf is buried near Biloxi and today is largely forgotten, Kinkor said.
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174986c5c108e75ab074a7ac2d810713 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jul-02-re-46915-story.html | Reinforce Closet Rod With a Wooden Dowel | Reinforce Closet Rod With a Wooden Dowel
Telescopic metal closet rods are easy to install because they expand to fit any closet. Because the rods are hollow, they tend to sag if you hang too much on them.
One solution is to fill the core with a wooden dowel rod. The dowel should be smaller than the inside diameter of the metal rod and about one-quarter inch shorter than the width of the closet.
Unscrew the metal rod from the closet walls, insert the dowel and reinstall.
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afec5a3adcc7b7ea77bf931e2a2a1fe9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jul-03-me-47356-story.html | Vegetarian Group Uses Jesus in Ads | Vegetarian Group Uses Jesus in Ads
An animal-rights group has turned to a well-known figure to promote vegetarianism: Jesus Christ.
About three dozen demonstrators from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals tried to deliver that message to Christians on Sunday outside the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. They carried signs proclaiming “Jesus was a Vegetarian” while a man dressed and groomed like popular depictions of Jesus waved at churchgoers stuck in traffic.
The demonstration was part of a campaign launched in 1997 to persuade Americans to give up all meat. “A diet without any animal products at all is what God intended,” said Bruce G. Friedrich, the “Jesus Was a Vegetarian” campaign coordinator of PETA.
“Anybody who eats meat is mocking God,” Friedrich said.
PETA members greeted curious motorists with free T-shirts bearing pictures of Jesus with an orange slice shaped like a halo behind his head. Between church services, demonstrator Jerry Friedman entered the cathedral, shook a pastor’s hand and handed him a pamphlet entitled “Jesus Was a Vegetarian. Follow Him.” One sign read “For Christ’s Sake, Go Vegetarian.”
Friedman said he’s well versed in pro-vegetarian passages in the Bible and spent the hourlong demonstration repeating Genesis 1:29. “It states that God made plants for us to eat, not animals,” Friedman said. “Jesus preached mercy and compassion, and the way that we raise animals for food is not merciful or compassionate.”
Crystal Cathedral officials did not return calls seeking comment.
PETA officials said they combed the Bible for verses supporting the theory that Jesus was a vegetarian, fodder for their million-dollar drive. So far, the group has distributed more than 50,000 leaflets and started an $80,000 billboard campaign before Easter this year in 16 cities across the nation. They also paid $10,000 for high-profile billboard space outside the Southern Baptist Convention in Atlanta last month.
Among slogans on the billboards: “Jesus Was a Vegetarian. Show Respect for God’s Creatures--Follow Him”; “Lamb of God: Please Don’t Eat His Creatures”; and “I Said, ‘Thou Shalt not Kill.’ Go Vegetarian.”
Though the campaign has drawn enthusiastic support from animal-rights activists, some scholars question how PETA interprets biblical accounts of Jesus’ diet.
“There certainly is nothing that would in any way suggest he was a vegetarian,” said Marilyn Harran, religion professor at Chapman University in Orange. There are many references in the Bible to eating fish, she said, also to Jesus participating in the Passover dinner, which would have included lamb.
“What about the division of the loaves and the fishes?” Harran asked. “I think it would be very antithetical to Jesus’ ministry to say that he went off and didn’t eat what other people did.”
PETA officials say the parable about Jesus feeding thousands with a few fishes and loaves of bread is just that: a parable. Bread was used, they argue, but the fishes are symbolic.
Even if Bible verses do not say specifically that Jesus ate only vegetables, some animal-rights advocates say PETA’s point makes sense philosophically because it espouses mercy and compassion.
“Sure, there were animal sacrifices in the Bible, but Jesus was against them,” said Friedman, a vegan from Huntington Beach who helped organize Sunday’s event.
“The practices of food production today are so much more cruel, they are an abomination of what Jesus preaches.”
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6e1e9328555aa0e4db67701359863bab | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jul-03-mn-47433-story.html | DotComGuy Delights in the Digital Life | DotComGuy Delights in the Digital Life
DotComGuy has passed the halfway mark without losing it.
The 26-year-old computer systems manager, who legally changed his name to reflect his online life, rented a Dallas townhouse six months ago and volunteered to live off e-commerce for a year, never to venture past his tiny backyard.
Since Jan. 1, he has bought his necessities and luxuries exclusively online.
DotComGuy’s home is a far cry from the empty, two-story domicile he strode into with nothing but a laptop computer and an Internet connection. Now, by any yuppie yardstick, his ducks are clearly in a row--the “Dotcompound” has a workout room, postmodern furniture, pets and gourmet food.
The effort has corporate sponsorship from online interests that hope DotComGuy’s life--and its dependence on the Internet--will encourage others to use cyberspace for transactions normally reserved for the storefront.
Similar experiments have been undertaken before--the TV program “Good Morning America” housed two New Yorkers in an “e-cave” for a week last year with a refrigerator, a $500 daily stipend, and Web access--but DotComGuy has vowed to live off the Internet longer than anyone else so far.
Two dozen cameras provide video of DotComGuy’s almost every move. His only sanctuary from the cameras is a bathroom. The entire operation is run from an adjoining townhome, where a bank of computers run by the DotComGuy team arrange the broadcast on the Internet at https://www.dotcomguy.com.
DotComGuy spends a good part of his day doing mundane things, and one can’t help but notice the self-consciousness of someone under constant surveillance. Even the dog--DotComDog--seems excruciatingly self-aware. DotComGuy has developed a peculiar habit: announcing thoughts that would normally be internalized by others.
“I’ve gotten better at it, though I’m not as good as I probably should be,” says the former Mitch Maddox. “I need to do it more often so people know what’s going on--I’ve invited them into my home and I need to at least be a courteous host and tell them what’s going through my mind.”
DotComGuy prepares meals with food delivered by online grocers. He says he doesn’t miss stepping out into the world to shop for food.
“With groceries, people say ‘Well, you’re isolating yourself; you’re not interacting with people.’ Truly, the last time you went to the grocery store, was your interaction with people of any quality?” he asks. “You were in a hurry, you didn’t want to talk to anybody, you didn’t want to wait in line, and you were probably in an express line.”
So far, the location of DotComGuy’s house has been kept secret, mainly for his security, spokeswoman Stephanie Germeraad says.
Patrick Keane, a senior analyst at Jupiter Communications, a New York-based research firm that studies Internet commerce, says the whole concept of DotComGuy seems like “Internet 1997" to him. “The novelty is gone, the shock value nonexistent,” he said. “If I’m an advertiser, there are a lot better places to place my branding message.”
But the site, which has banner ads from companies like United Parcel Service, has more than 1 1/2 million hits a day, Germeraad said, though that number is lower than when the site first started. It seems a core group of users log on to see what DotComGuy is up to on a regular basis and the average time per session is 27 minutes.
If anything, the DotComGuy experiment sheds more light on the life of a homebound bachelor.
“We know his habits pretty well, his demeanor, his personality,” Germeraad said. “But he fools us every now and then. Sometimes we’ll think we know what he’s going to say or do, and he totally comes at us from left field.”
Such interest in others’ lives is really nothing new, according to social psychology professor Frank T. McAndrew at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill.
“All these things, like MTV’s “Real World” and the new “Survivor” program, show how we have sort of an innate interest in the goings on of other people’s personal lives,” McAndrew said. “It’s so we’ve evolved to know that other people are monitoring us all the time--for any little faux pas.”
DotComGuy says his most embarrassing moment has been a tripping on the stairs and sitting on a chair that broke. He shrugs them off as one-time occurrences.
Now it’s dinner time.
“What’s today’s date?” he asks as he dates a check for a pizza he just ordered online, going between the computer mouse and the checkbook. “I don’t keep track of the days,” he says, shifting in his chair.
“I don’t concern myself with it because, if I did, then I’d go nuts.”
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719462764f2e87b121f3909671a6707f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jul-03-mn-47440-story.html | Mexico’s Ruling Party Loses Presidency in Historic Election | Mexico’s Ruling Party Loses Presidency in Historic Election
Voters in Mexico ousted the world’s longest-ruling faction, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, on Sunday, handing the presidency to maverick businessman Vicente Fox in a stunning upset, according to preliminary results.
“The next president of the republic will be Mr. Vicente Fox Quesada,” declared President Ernesto Zedillo in a nationally televised address late Sunday. “Today we have proved that our democracy is mature.”
It was the first time in 71 years that a Mexican president had announced he was turning over the powerful office to another party.
Fox of the National Action Party, or PAN, was the clear winner in a series of quick counts carried out by the nation’s election agency at representative polling stations. He also was leading by 6 to 9 percentage points in three exit polls carried out by Mexican television networks and an exit poll conducted separately by The Times and the Mexico City daily Reforma.
The ruling party’s loss spelled the end of a political regime that influenced nearly all aspects of Mexican life in the 20th century. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, created a system based on virtual one-party rule that modernized Mexico and brought it remarkable political stability. But the party had come under increasing attack in recent years for economic mismanagement and corruption.
“It’s like the collapse of the Berlin Wall, or the collapse of the Communist system,” Mexican writer and environmentalist Homero Aridjis said.
Roderic Camp, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College in California, proclaimed it a “revolutionary change.”
“This is Mexico moving the process of democratization for the first time at the national level beyond the electoral process,” he said.
In other words: Mexico doesn’t just have clean elections now. It is going to change the party at the pinnacle of power. That puts the vote on a par with the U.S. election of 1800, the first time political power changed hands democratically in the United States.
“We are inaugurating a new political regime at this moment,” said Lorenzo Meyer, a prominent historian, speaking on Mexican television.
Spontaneous celebrations erupted outside the PAN headquarters here, where supporters held up giant foam symbols of Fox’s anti-PRI campaign and cried: Ya! (Enough already!) Thousands more gathered around a major Mexico City monument, the Angel of Independence, whooping, blowing horns and madly waving flags.
“This is a moment that Mexico has waited for--60 years of fighting so that our vote would be respected. Finally, we have won,” declared a weeping PAN senator, Maria Elena Alvarez, at the party headquarters.
PRI’s Labastida Concedes Defeat
PRI presidential candidate Francisco Labastida, who had held a slender margin in preelection polls, conceded defeat late Sunday.
“The citizens took a decision that we must respect. I will set an example,” the longtime bureaucrat said. “Our party is alive, it will stay alive and will know how to recover, with the unity of all the PRI members.”
Zedillo praised the PRI for its historic contributions to Mexico, and for passing reforms allowing the nation’s cleanest presidential election in history. Many of those reforms were spearheaded by Zedillo himself, who abandoned the tradition by which outgoing presidents effectively selected their successors.
Zedillo announced he will meet shortly with the president-elect to help coordinate the country’s first democratic, peaceful turnover of power. He said he had telephoned Fox to assure him of the “absolute willingness of the government I lead to work together in all important aspects to ensure a good start for the next administration.”
There were no clear results Sunday night on the outcome of congressional elections. All seats in the federal Senate and Chamber of Deputies were being contested. The PRI lost control of the lower house for the first time in 1997 and always has had a majority in the Senate.
PAN Unseats PRI for Governor Post
In the other major race Sunday, exit polls indicated the Mexico City mayor’s post would go to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the center-left Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD. The PAN won two state governorships up for grabs, succeeding the PRI in Morelos and cinching a third straight term in Guanajuato, where Fox grew up.
Fox moved quickly Sunday night to assure members of other parties--especially the PRI, which still controls two-thirds of Mexico’s governorships--that he wants to cooperate and not seek vengeance. He pledged to include members of other parties in his government.
“This is the starting point for building a great nation,” he declared in a television interview, looking composed, as usual.
“Today we celebrate. It’s a historic day. A day of happiness. But tomorrow the work begins,” he declared.
Fox differed little from his PRI competitor, Labastida, on substantive issues. Both favor Mexico’s pro-market course and had promised greater economic growth and more spending on education. But Fox presented himself as the man who could bring true democracy to Mexico.
And voters overwhelmingly wanted change, according to results from the Times/Reforma exit poll, which gave Fox a 45% to 36% lead over Labastida. The PRD’s Cuauhtemoc Cardenas was running a distant third, with 17%, according to the poll.
The PAN is a center-right, pro-business party founded in 1939. For years, it was as good as shut out of power by the PRI, a party that was virtually fused to the federal government. It wasn’t until 1989 that the PAN won a governorship in Mexico, taking Baja California.
The party has made steady gains in recent years, especially in cities and northern states and among young people. But it took the charismatic candidacy of Fox to make it a genuine contender for the presidency. Fox, 58, a towering, mustached figure often compared with the Marlboro Man, is a former rancher, Coca-Cola executive and governor of the central state of Guanajuato.
He revolutionized Mexican politics by running a three-year, U.S.-style campaign heavy on media coverage and blunt language. He abandoned the stuffy image of Mexican politicians, donning blue jeans and cowboy boots in his endless travels around the country.
Fox is not expected to significantly change Mexico’s relations with the United States. But, he told The Times late Sunday: “We will be starting a new relationship, a relationship that will be the result of the first democratic government of Mexico. This gives us moral authority, and democratic legitimacy. My commitment is that we can construct something good between our nations. We are friends, we are neighbors, we are partners in NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement]. And now we are going to increase that relationship.”
Sunday’s PRI loss marked the culmination of a long slide in the party’s support. For much of the 20th century, the PRI won the presidency with more than 75% of the vote. Such high margins were the result of the party’s achievements in modernizing Mexico, the near-absence of opposition parties and outright fraud.
The PRI reign was so long--and the party so omnipresent--that many Mexicans seemed to think it would be in power forever. Even in 1994, Zedillo won with better than 50% of the vote, like all his PRI predecessors.
“This basically changes the mentality of the Mexican people. [It shows] that what has occurred on the state and local levels--where opposition victories have been real and functional--is true on the national level,” said Camp, the political scientist.
The vote reflected the vast changes that have occurred under the PRI. In a matter of decades, Mexico has been transformed from a mainly rural society to a mostly urban, better educated populace.
Even beyond the opposition victory, the vote was a watershed in a country in which the PRI had traditionally won elections by stealing ballot boxes, busing in supporters and even resorting to bloodshed. Only minor irregularities were reported Sunday. A mere 0.01% of polling stations failed to open Sunday, a record.
The balloting was overseen for the first time by an independent authority, the Federal Electoral Institute, the showpiece of sweeping legal reforms instituted in the last few years.
“We are looking at an exemplary vote,” said Jose Woldenberg, president of the institute.
The vote was preceded by a campaign that was more equitable than any in modern Mexican history. Due to the country’s increasing democracy and electoral reforms, the PRI lost such traditional advantages as one-sided media coverage and lopsided campaign financing.
Many Mexicans believe that fraud tipped the scales in the presidential election in 1988, when the PRI got a serious challenge from Cardenas, the son of a legendary former president. Cardenas again ran unsuccessfully in 1994.
While there was little blatant fraud reported Sunday, opposition parties and electoral observers complained that the PRI’s vast machine had shifted into high gear in recent weeks, pressuring voters or attempting to buy their loyalty through such freebies as food packages and building materials.
Still, the PRI entered the election with greater democratic credentials than ever. Labastida became the party’s candidate through its first presidential primary. It was a major break from the dedazo, or fingering, with which each outgoing president named another PRI member as his successor, with elections serving merely to ratify the choice.
Some Cast Their Vote ‘Against Corruption’
On Sunday, voters said the changes had transformed their experiences of a presidential election.
“For the first time in the life of Mexico, people feel they can make a difference voting,” said Miguel Elenes, 36, an office worker, after he cast his ballot in Roma, a middle-class Mexico City neighborhood.
Mexicans voted in droves. Long lines snaked from polling stations in crowded cities and tree-lined village plazas. In addition to the three leading candidates, two minor-party politicians also sought the presidency: Manuel Camacho Solis of the Center Democratic Party and Gilberto Rincon Gallardo of the Social Democratic Party.
Many of those voting for Fox explained their choices as a rejection of the PRI, rather than support for any particular policy ideas of the PAN candidate.
“My vote is against corruption--70 years of it,” said Juan Sarmiento Juarez, who cast his ballot for Fox in a middle-class neighborhood of Puebla, in central Mexico.
“We are seeking change for the well-being of our children. The young people who are better educated are the ones making the change happen,” the 50-year-old salesman declared.
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Times staff writers James F. Smith and Ken Ellingwood contributed to this report.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
The History of the PRI
1929: Ex-President Plutarco Elias Calles forms the National Revolutionary Party, precursor to the Institutional Revolutionary Party, uniting factions that emerged from the 1910-17 revolution and providing a means for the peaceful transfer of power.
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1938: Lazaro Cardenas nationalizes the oil industry, the climax of his strongly nationalist presidency. Cardenas also carries out land reform and organizes rural and labor groups. Ruling party is renamed Mexican Revolution Party.
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1946: Miguel Aleman becomes first civilian president since 1929. Ruling party takes its current name, Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
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1954: Mexico starts a roughly 20-year period of sustained growth that becomes PRI’s “Golden Age.” Average annual growth of at least 5% allows increased spending on schools, hospitals and other infrastructure.
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1968: Anti-government protests by students end in disaster, as the army and police massacre about 300 demonstrators in Mexico City. The killing is a turning point in society’s view of PRI government.
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1982: Oil prices fall and Mexico enters an economic crisis. It is the start of a “Lost Decade” for Mexico and much of debt-ridden Latin America.
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1987: PRI suffers its first major split when Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, son of the legendary president, and other leftists bolt.
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1988: Cardenas gives PRI its stiffest challenge, nearly winning elections plagued by fraud and the collapse of the election computer system. Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the PRI wins.
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1989: For the first time, PRI loses a governorship--to the center-right National Action Party, or PAN, in Baja California.
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1993: Mexico joins the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, reinforcing the break with its protectionist past.
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1994: Zapatista rebels launch an uprising in the southern state of Chiapas, demanding better conditions for indigenous people. Scores are killed before a cease-fire is reached. PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio is assassinated in Tijuana. Campaign coordinator Ernesto Zedillo replaces him and wins the election, only to see the peso plummet and foreign capital flee shortly after he takes office. It is the worst economic crisis in modern Mexican history.
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1997: PRI loses majority in the lower house of Congress for the first time and loses control of Mexico City to Cardenas in the first direct mayoral election.
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1999: Zedillo abandons the tradition of hand-picking the PRI presidential nominee. PRI holds its first open presidential primary, nominating Francisco Labastida, who faces PAN’s Vicente Fox and Cardenas in the tightest race in Mexican history.
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ELECTION RECORD
PRI’s share of vote in presidential elections:
1934 Lazaro Cardenas: 98.1%
1940 Manuel Avila Camacho: 93.8%
1946 Miguel Aleman: 77.9%
1952 Adolfo Ruiz Cortines: 74.3%
1958 Adolfo Lopez Mateos: 90.4%
1964 Gustavo Diaz Ordaz: 88.8%
1970 Luis Echeverria: 85.8%
1976 Jose Lopez Portillo: 98.7%
1982 Miguel de la Madid: 71.6%
1988 Caolos Salinas de Gortari: 50.7%
1994 Ernesto Zedillo: 50.2%
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More on the Vote
* POLL RESULTS--Those who voted for Fox were driven by one overwhelming desire--change. A17
* A CLEAN ELECTION--Balloting gains praise from observers as apparently free of major fraud. A18
* MAYOR’S RACE--A leftist heads for win in Mexico City and is a contender for president in 2006. A18
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971a52e2454cb386d6f4138db0edb84d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jul-07-mn-49042-story.html | Instructor Offered to Fly With JFK Jr., Report Says | Instructor Offered to Fly With JFK Jr., Report Says
John F. Kennedy Jr. turned down an offer by one of his flying instructors to accompany him the night of his doomed flight to Martha’s Vineyard, saying that he “wanted to do it alone,” federal investigators reported Thursday.
The accident that killed Kennedy, his wife and his sister-in-law nearly a year ago--and left the nation mourning after its most prominent political family had suffered another tragedy--was caused by an inexperienced pilot who became disoriented in the dark and lost control, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded in its final report.
The report confirmed earlier theories by other aviation experts that Kennedy was stretching his capabilities as he attempted the 200-mile flight--its final phase over a dark, hazy sea. Investigators found no mechanical problems with his single-engine Piper Saratoga or its navigational systems.
Kennedy, 38, was the son of assassinated President John F. Kennedy and the late Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. He was a prosecutor in New York before he founded a glossy political magazine and married Carolyn Bessette, a New York socialite and former fashion industry publicist. The couple, along with her sister Lauren Bessette, were headed from their Manhattan home to a cousin’s wedding.
Kennedy kept his plane at an airport in suburban New Jersey and previously had flown solo at night to Martha’s Vineyard. But the report noted that he had limited experience with night flight. And Kennedy, who had logged 310 hours as a pilot, was not yet proficient in flying by instruments. The report said that the instructor who offered to go with him was not “comfortable” with Kennedy alone at the controls that evening, July 16.
The report also suggests that Kennedy did not use all the tools at his disposal to enhance safety. Investigators did not comment on whether that was because of inexperience or was a conscious decision.
For example, the plane’s sophisticated autopilot system could have been used that night. According to independent experts, the autopilot could have flown Kennedy to within a few hundred feet of the runway. However, investigators found that the device--though in working order--was turned off.
The report quoted one of Kennedy’s flight instructors as saying that he “seemed competent” in his use of the autopilot.
Among the features of the aircraft’s autopilot system was a “flight director” that allows a pilot to fly the aircraft while receiving continuous prompts on what actions to take.
“If you’re hand-flying, the flight director can give you all the cues you need,” said Warren Morningstar, a private pilot and spokesman for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assn. “What I have been taught is to use every tool available to me in the airplane.
“You come away from this with the observation that the information was there for the pilot and the pilot had tools available to him--and for whatever reason, the pilot didn’t utilize all the tools and information available.”
“It’s an excellent autopilot,” said Al Pregler, a retired airline captain from Fullerton, Calif. “It probably could have gotten him down to the last 100 feet.”
Kennedy also could have used his radio to ask Federal Aviation Administration air traffic controllers for guidance but did not do so.
According to the report, Kennedy had taken off about 8:40 p.m. After about an hour of routine flight, he began his descent toward the island of Martha’s Vineyard, a popular summer resort. Meteorological instruments at the airport recorded adequate visibility, but pilots in the area reported problems seeing the horizon because of haze.
Kennedy’s descent was anything but routine. Radar information showed that the plane leveled off, then climbed, then went into a dive and soon turned tightly to the right, spiraling toward the water at high speed.
NTSB investigators concluded that the probable cause of the accident was “the pilot’s failure to maintain control of the airplane during a descent over water at night, which was a result of spatial disorientation.”
Illusions that cause pilots to become disoriented at night or in poor visibility are a well-documented phenomenon. “This has been going on since aviation started,” said Pregler, the retired airline captain.
“If you are not able to fly by instruments, you are dependent on your body,” he explained. “Your sense of balance is determined by your inner ear--and your inner ear can lie to you. You can lose awareness. You don’t know if you are turning or climbing or diving. What you may perceive is happening can be entirely different from what is really happening.”
Under those conditions, a pilot’s actions can make things worse, precipitating a type of dive known as a “graveyard spiral.”
Experts say it is unlikely that the Kennedy plane crash will lead to any changes in government safety requirements for private pilots. According to Morningstar, night training has been improved in recent years, and accidents as a result of disorientation have been steadily declining.
But the Kennedy crash has made a deep impression as a cautionary tale. “This has been a point of discussion among pilots,” Morningstar said. “Everyone is more cognizant that these are the types of illusions that can hit you when you are flying at night.”
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), the family patriarch, declined to comment on the latest findings.
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05d8b27e72feab8dcbd94c40730c2c23 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jul-14-sp-53105-story.html | Ex-Trojan Receiver Soward Agrees to a 5-Year Contract | Ex-Trojan Receiver Soward Agrees to a 5-Year Contract
The Jacksonville Jaguars and first-round draft pick R. Jay Soward have agreed to a five-year contract worth about $5.5 million, a source close to the negotiations said Thursday.
Soward’s agent, Leigh Steinberg, flew to Jacksonville on Thursday to secure the deal. Soward is expected to sign the contract today.
The former USC receiver was the 29th player selected in the NFL draft. He has said he does not want to be a training-camp holdout. Camp begins next Friday.
The Jaguars endured their first rookie holdout of any significance last year when cornerback Fernando Bryant stayed out of camp for 11 days.
“That won’t happen here,” Steinberg said. “R. Jay will be on time.”
Soward’s contract will count $860,000 against the Jaguars’ salary cap in 2000.
He will compete for the Jaguars’ third receiver spot. At USC, he had 161 catches for 2,672 yards and 23 touchdowns.
*
Former USC quarterback Rodney Peete, who has played for four other NFL teams, joined his brother by signing a free-agent contract with the Oakland Raiders.
Peete, 34, who has played in 87 NFL games in 11 seasons with the Detroit Lions, Dallas Cowboys, Philadelphia Eagles and Washington Redskins, completed eight of 17 passes for 107 yards and two touchdowns in three games for the Redskins last season.
Peete played for Philadelphia from 1995-98, and Raider Coach Jon Gruden was offensive coordinator for the Eagles in the first three of those seasons.
Peete starred in baseball and football at USC before being selected by the Lions in the sixth round of the 1989 draft. His brother, Skip Peete, is the Raiders’ running backs coach.
*
The Cleveland Browns signed former Miami Dolphin offensive tackle James Brown to a one-year deal to fill a gap left by the injury to Orlando Brown.
The 6-foot-6, 325-pound James Brown, an eight-year NFL veteran, was released by the Dolphins on June 15. He started 14 games with the Dolphins last season.
Orlando Brown, sidelined since he was accidentally struck in the right eye by a weighted referee’s flag in a game against the Jaguars on Dec. 19, was put on the physically-unable-to-perform list Wednesday.
*
Guard Dave Szott of the Kansas City Chiefs, who has sold his Kansas City home and threatened to retire if not traded to an East Coast team, will be with the Chiefs when they open camp next week.
At least that’s the way Coach Gunther Cunningham sees it.
“I’ve said all along he’s going to be a member of our football team,” Cunningham said. “I think he’ll be here on July 18 ready to start.”
Cunningham said he is also confident right guard Will Shields will have his contract situation resolved “in the next few days.” Shields, a three-time Pro Bowler, was designated the Chiefs’ franchise player and offered a one-year contract for $4.1 million. He has held out for a multiyear deal.
Szott, a 10-year veteran and former All-Pro, wants to be closer to his New Jersey home to provide care for his son, Shane, who has cerebral palsy. He did not take part in minicamp in May and recently indicated in a television interview from New Jersey that his career in Kansas City was finished.
The Chiefs open camp in River Falls, Wis., next Friday. They are holding a special precamp session with rookies Tuesday.
*
The Indianapolis Colts came to terms with second-round draft pick Marcus Washington, a linebacker from Auburn. . . . The San Francisco 49ers signed linebacker Jeff Ulbrich, a third-round draft pick from Hawaii, to a three-year contract worth $1.21 million. . . . The Minnesota Vikings signed seventh-round draft pick Giles Cole, who played tight end for Texas A&M; Kingsville.
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adbe171a33869d11b23e159ea4da4e4b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jul-16-ca-53595-story.html | When the Media Burned Atlanta | When the Media Burned Atlanta
It was 1981, in the heat of the case, and the numbers of outsiders pouring into Atlanta were soaring along with the summer thermometer and headlines shouting, “They Found Another Body.”
The psychics were there, five of them sent by the National Enquirer. Five out-of-town super-cops dropped in briefly too, as did the man with the tracking dogs and the crime-busting Guardian Angels from New York.
Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson came and went. Roy Innis of the Congress of Racial Equality stayed long enough to display a photograph of a man he claimed was behind these inexplicable serial killings of Atlanta’s African Americans that had been occurring for two years.
All of it made fine pictures.
There was plenty to report, and along with the local press, plenty of media carpetbaggers from across the U.S. and abroad to report it. Thick swarms of them, congregating in hotels like locusts and crisscrossing the city with their eyes peeled, including the network news star seen being driven to and from poor African American neighborhoods in a shiny black limo.
The Atlanta child murders, as they came to be known, were a great story. Even though some of the 29 victims on the official list were not children, and the real story--beyond the loopy theories and chest beating for cameras--would turn out to be that the media blew the real story:
The 1982 conviction of a young hustler named Wayne Williams, far from being the capper on this case that authorities maintained, may have resolved almost nothing. And the murders of young African Americans in Atlanta, their often-mutilated bodies turning up everywhere, were continuing. As were the socioeconomic conditions that exposed them to danger.
Some of that is in “Who Killed Atlanta’s Children?” This edgy and interesting, if flawed, new Showtime movie stars Gregory Hines and James Belushi as authors of 1986 stories in Spin magazine accusing authorities of botching the case and covering up secret findings that up to 15 of the victims may have been slain by a Ku Klux Klan family hoping to ignite a race war in Atlanta.
Police ineptitude had been vividly depicted in Abby Mann’s 1985 CBS miniseries, “The Atlanta Child Murders,” and in “The List,” Chet Dettlinger’s book that also maintained Williams was a scapegoat because the murders continued even after he was jailed on charges of killing two adults and linked to the deaths of others on the victims list.
But tonight’s Showtime account adds resonance to the Spin articles (the authors, Robert Keating and Barry Michael Cooper, are renamed Ron Larson and Pat Laughlin in the movie) that appeared to substantiate rumors about Klan involvement that previously had not risen above vague speculation.
“Who Killed Atlanta’s Children?” is written and directed by Charles Robert Carner and produced by former Spin editor Rudy Langlais. They deliver a dandy little nonfiction mystery on many counts, one that has New Yorkers Larson (Hines) and Laughlin (Belushi) in Atlanta chasing trails that lead in many directions--were the victims part of a sex ring involving high city officials?--in an atmosphere of suspense, danger and deception in lofty echelons of city government. A fruitful investigation was aborted and evidence destroyed. Why?
The journalists get lucky when they’re leaked the files of that secret probe by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. When they meet the whistle-blower, former Atlanta cop Aubrey Melton (Sean McCann), things seem to fall partially into place. Until again falling askew.
*
Unfortunately, “Who Killed Atlanta’s Children?” at times feels like a formulaic buddy film and injects over-the-top and highly speculative scenes that smack of dramatic invention en route to a conclusion that spreads more fog than light. Now middle-aged, meanwhile, Williams continues to serve his life sentence.
The wider media story is understandably beyond the film’s agenda but no less significant than what’s on the screen, for it foreshadowed much of what was ahead in coming decades of journalistic excess.
Many of those out-of-town reporters popped into Atlanta for ratings-sweeps quickies and stayed just long enough to form capsule impressions, which distorted the meanings of the slayings and the image of a city known for being coolheaded during the civil rights violence of the ‘60s. Stations would bring in a crew, do the “Atlanta: City of Fear” theme, interview an official and then blow town. From many of these reports, you would have thought all of Atlanta was living in terror and the city was verging on a racial holocaust.
Reporters everywhere can walk blindfolded through coverage of routine homicides. Yet when a murder case is more than just macabre, when it is complex and socially significant, when media must use restraint and weigh their own interests against those of the individual, then watch out.
The most repugnant sideshows in Atlanta did not begin as sideshows. They were the funerals of the young victims, where too many media decided that their rights superseded the right of private grief.
Ask a victim’s mother how she feels? How should she feel? Her child is dead.
One victim’s funeral was invaded by a British TV crew that began taping by slamming together a movie clapboard and lighting up the church like a movie set. At another funeral, an Algerian TV reporter delivered a stand-up in front of his camera as the minister delivered the eulogy. And so abundant were media lights at yet another funeral that they overloaded the church electrical system, causing a terrible odor.
*
There were 15 TV cameras and 10 still cameras at the funeral of one victim, where a network cameraman leaned on the casket to get a shot of the distraught mother. Yet most repugnant of all, perhaps, was the Atlanta TV crew that camped outside the home of a slain youth to televise police breaking the news to his parents.
Why did families tolerate these abuses?
Because most were lesser-educated, easy to intimidate and unaware of their right to tell the media to screw off.
While reporting the story of the slayings, meanwhile, most of the media ignored the larger story of how poverty was ultimately responsible for the victims--many of them street-savvy kids earning money at jobs that sometimes included prostitution--being out on the pavement and accessible to the killer or killers. Many of these kids were half-dead even before they were murdered.
And while purporting to tell their stories, much of the media profited on their backs. *
*
“Who Killed Atlanta’s Children” can be seen tonight at 8 p.m. on Showtime. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).
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1af0972a39c771bfcaf4af733dedc87e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jul-16-tm-53668-story.html | Confessions of a Civil Rights Daughter | Confessions of a Civil Rights Daughter
IF AINT BABY IS WATCHING, THEN SHE HAS SEEN HERSELF DIE A THOUSAND TIMES.
On a porch in Greenwood, Miss., 1965. Flesh and blood dissolve into memory, in the instant it takes to light a fire and throw it.
If Aint Baby is listening, then she surely has heard her story told again and again, on stages in London, New York and Los Angeles. Her life is art; her death is a loss registered in history.
Now they are applauding her, lavishing praise on the memory of an illiterate midwife, a field hand, a black woman born in the Mississippi Delta, killed by other children of the Delta. Now they are applauding her baby girl who, faced with years of silent mourning, eventually found a place on the stage. Aint Baby’s daughter, who laid everything out like it was a fine Sunday meal: rape, murder, hate, joy, pride, resistance. Laid it out, then invited London, New York and Los Angeles to sit and bear witness. The daughter who left the Mississippi Delta in 1965 as Ida Mae Holland, a 20-year-old with her GED scores pinned to her brassiere, too devastated to cry, too poor to buy a tombstone, a final tribute for her mother’s grave.
“I promised I would give her a tombstone that the world could see,” the daughter says, “and I did with my play. They know [her name] all over the world.”
The daughter is now Endesha Ida Mae Holland, PhD, prize-winning playwright (“From the Mississippi Delta”), author, USC professor and former foot soldier in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The daughter is now a griot, a storyteller using her plays and book to testify about a place, a moment in history that is impossible to fully understand unless you were there.
You had to be there.
The grainy black-and-white footage of Mississippi during the civil rights movement can never capture the long-playing nature of certain memories. Those scenes of protest
stir sadness, anger, pride, then victory, but they do not show the rest: the hurting years that followed when there were no cameras. When the losses were tallied in individual lives, Aint Baby was dead. Her daughter, deeply wounded, was left to build tombstones, left to live and always return. Her daughter, for whom a trip home is never just that.
Especially now.
*
“If South is a perspective as well as a direction, then the Mississippi
Delta may well be the most Southern place on earth.”
--"From the Mississippi Delta, a Memoir.”
*
ONE DAY THIS SPRING, ENDESHA IDA MAE HOLLAND TRAVELS BACK TO that most Southern place at the invitation of the University of Mississippi at Oxford.
The request to speak at the Seventh Oxford Conference for the Book carries centuries of significance. Oxford is the hometown of William Faulkner. Ole Miss is where students rioted when James Meredith tried to enroll in 1962. Four hundred U.S. troops clashed with 2,500 students and others opposed to integration. Two people were killed.
In those years, Ole Miss was something black folks could only dream about--a gleam in someone’s eye. Holland sees the offer to speak through those eyes, the eyes of her elders, that solid generation who taught their children to revere teachers and ministers, who embraced God as the answer and education as a way out and up.
“By virtue of inviting me,” she says, “they’ve invited Mama.”
For Mama and the others, she accepts, the way she has done so often in the past. But these are not ordinary times for Aint Baby’s daughter.
Holland, 55, is in a wheelchair, placed there by ataxia, a genetic disorder in which the cerebellum, that part of the brain that controls muscular movement, slowly degenerates. Things that were once simple--speaking, bathing, teaching, traveling--are now grueling. The illness devastates the body but leaves the processes of the mind untouched. So the trip to Oxford is a time of reflection and planning, all the while racing against an oversized opponent. “This illness has taken hold,” Holland says, “but I don’t want to give in.”
Holland has been fighting and resisting for a long time. If she had stopped every time things got hard, she never would have made it out of the Delta and the raggedy life it had planned for her.
To make this journey back, she will need the help of two women: Joy Shani A’Che and Ronda Racha Penrice. A’Che is her live-in personal assistant and creative partner. She is working with Trina Davis Cundieff on a feature film and documentary about Holland, which Charles Burnett (“To Sleep With Anger”) has agreed to direct. “There’s such a need to do films that aren’t always comedy or violent, or big-budget explosions and effects,” A’Che says. “There’s a need to show human drama, drama that rejuvenates the human spirit from a black perspective.”
On this trip, A’Che is the coordinator, making hotel and meal arrangements, pushing Holland’s wheelchair. Penrice is an Ole Miss master’s candidate whose thesis is on regional identity in African American literature. She will be their driver and will read Holland’s work at the conference.
The three women arrive on a Friday, with Holland scheduled to speak the next day. But before the panel discussion and readings, there is a first stop: Greenwood, more than an hour’s drive south of Oxford and many years away.
Greenwood bills itself as “The Cotton Capital of the World.” It is home to Cottonlandia, a cotton museum that Holland has never visited and never will. “That was an old plantation. It was the big house. I lived with it every day. I figured I didn’t have to see it. We couldn’t even touch the same Bible as a white person. We never went through the front door of a white person’s house.”
HOLLAND HAS THE LOOK OF SOMEONE CREATED DURING AN ABUNDANT season. She has big eyes, a deep-brown hue, full features, a wide smile. Every element came to her in generous proportions, as if God wanted to be sure no one would ever overlook her. She is a woman with extreme tolerance for questions, even those that make her cry or look off into someplace no one can see except her. But she has no tolerance for those who treat her as if she is not the somebody she has spent a lifetime becoming.
What she has become is a patron. Each month Holland signs checks that will be sent to college students, artists and others with financial needs. In the past she has taken complete strangers into her life--and sometimes into her home--and made them believe in themselves, then gotten them into school. At one time she put a clause into her play contract to make sure black directors would be considered for the job.
“It’s our generation that has to step up and help the young folks,” Holland says. “We have to tell what we’ve been through so our young people know they don’t have to stay down. They can come up.”
In Greenwood, people like Eva Brown Simpson remember how far down Holland was. “How you doin’, Dr. Lady?” asks Simpson, a childhood friend.
Simpson is ready for this visit. There are pots and plates waiting in her kitchen: greens, hot-water corn bread, baked chicken, black-eyed peas, okra, sweet potatoes, peach cobbler and RC cola. A bottle of homemade pepper sauce in a Crown Royal bottle sits on the table. Z.Z. Hill is crooning “Down Home Blues” on the radio, and soon Holland is into a plate of collard greens and corn bread the connoisseur’s way: with her hands.
Simpson watches with a satisfied look. “I told my sister that’s how you was gon’ eat em. She said, ‘No, she won’t,’ ” as if Holland would eat differently now that she has a doctorate. “I said, ‘Yes, she do, that’s the only way to eat ‘em.’ ”
These are Holland’s people and they know her. Bessie Ruth Kohn leaves heads under the dryer in her beauty shop to come visit. Her joy fills up all the space in Simpson’s kitchen.
“Girl, I’m so proud of you, I don’t know what to do,” Kohn says. “I read the book, girl, I love it. I love it. You is something else, girl. Somethin’ to be proud of.”
This is Holland’s Greenwood, the place where she was born, the place where she was named after her mother, the first Ida Mae, and then nicknamed Cat. She had a baby doll named Sister Girl, two brothers and a sister, no father and a mother.
Greenwood is where they became friends, she and her Mama. Mama was the first theatrical one in the family. She made Cat the audience while she “play-acted,” imitating the white woman she worked for. Mama cried big, silent tears when she was sad and sang the blues when she was happy.
This is Holland’s world, but Greenwood is Mississippi, and Mississippi is as “flinching and beautiful” as the author Richard Ford described it. Without warning the scenes change; a lovely landscape gives way to another country and other memories.
That used to be a movie theater. This is the church. Right there is the funeral home where they took the boy’s body.
She is 11 years old, conspiring with her playmates, peeping through a back window. The body of 15-year-old Emmett Till lay, bloated with river water, dismembered, disfigured, lynched. A sight for a little girl’s eyes. A white man tells them: See what happens when you sass a white woman.
Evelyn Estes was a little girl with Cat. She remembers: We used to laugh and make jokes and play church and hopscotch and do childish things. In the summer, we used to sit out on Highway 82 and watch all the white people drive by in their cars with the windows rolled up. We used to fantasize about growing up and having nice cars, and rings on every finger and watches all up our arms.
The white man lives in the house where Cat works, baby-sitting his granddaughter. He summons her into his room. It is her birthday. She expects something good.
In that room, he rapes her childhood away. When he finishes, he hands her a $5 bill. She clutches it tightly, as if it were the part of her he took.
“Everything changed with that incident,” says Estes. “She was just not that laughing, devilish child. We used to talk about hugging and kissing. You know how young girls do? Like this boy and that boy? We didn’t like any boys anymore. It just took that away.
“It made you wonder: ‘What is the matter with the black people down here? The grown-ups. Why didn’t they go and pull this man out of his house and hang him? That’s what they did to black people.’ ”
But in 1956, Greenwood is not a town of two-way streets. It is a town where a white man can rape a black girl without fear of arrest. There will be no lynching.
This is part of the Delta’s landscape. In 1956, rape of black women and girls is as alarming in white society as a rusting pump or dust in the attic. This man will continue having birthdays and enjoying favorite meals. Cat will never tell her Mama or her brothers, because she loves them and there is nothing they can do, except cry and get themselves killed.
That used to be Broad Street High School. This is downtown. These the streets where we marched.
Aint Baby is a midwife, so skilled at “catching babies” that she once turned a breech birth in the womb and delivered a healthy child. She is so respected they consider her a “doctor lady.” She wants that and more for her children.
The Delta wants another “good” colored, one who knows how to expect nothing, to know nothing. The Delta offers Cat a half-life, and expects her to take it.
Neither the Delta nor Aint Baby get what they want from this child. In 1962, Cat is 18 and a single mother. She is a high-school dropout and a prostitute: $5 for black men, $10 for whites. She is a thief, a jailbird and “the worse somebody in town.”
Until a summer day in 1962. That day she is on a mission, hoping to turn a trick with a new man in town. That man is Bob Moses, who would become a legend of the movement and in Cat’s life. He leads her straight to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee office and into the heart of the voter-registration effort in Mississippi. The young workers are full of purpose. What they propose, registering black people to vote, is full of danger. And Cat wants to be like them, talk like them, share their purpose.
“This is what freed me in Mississippi,” Holland says. “We didn’t know nothing about voting until the civil rights movement came. We didn’t know how bad off we were.”
Aint Baby is scared. She begs her child not to “mess around with “dem Freedom Riders.” She tells that “omanish gal not to be stirring up trouble with the white folks.” But Cat is already changing, seeing possibilities.
People who had looked down on her now look to her to help lead. After all, she had already been arrested and been to jail; she knew what it was like. She had already been an outcast.
She is perfect for the movement.
In those old black-and-white films of the movement, she is there, still just a tender-faced girl, leading the marchers to the courthouse, facing down the local deputy sheriff, Mr. Big Smitty. She faces black folks who welcome her and some so afraid that they pull guns when workers knock on their doors to talk about registering.
“Miss Fannie Lou Hamer taught me how to canvass, how to stand strong and not show fear,” Holland says, “even though we were scared to death.”
At the request of movement leaders, Cat travels the country to talk about Mississippi. She serves the movement and is changed by it, before ever realizing the price she would pay.
*
THE CEMETERY FOR BLACK FOLKS IN GREENWOOD IS A LARGE OPEN lot. The grass has not been cut and a wild mess of green has taken over. The gravestones and markers lie in a state of confusion in the high grass, as if they woke up one morning and suddenly found themselves here, competing with weeds for the attention of passersby. Aint Baby is buried here.
Cat was dry-eyed at the funeral. There was too much to cry about, and not enough tears. And not enough clear thinking space in the Delta in the 1960s to make sense of it.
“What you have to remember is, you in the heart of the South,” Estes says. “Those white folks wasn’t just going to roll over and say, ‘OK, we’ve treated you wrong, we’re gonna give you this.’ ”
After all, white leaders had created a holiday to celebrate the Leflore County Massacre of 1889, the year white residents killed many black people who had been seeking political rights. Now here was Cat, trampling all over that line that divided Greenwood in black and white.
Aint Baby, who had never even tried to register to vote, was alone in the house when the white men came that day in 1965. She had dutifully served white people all her life, picking their cotton, ironing their clothes, cleaning their homes. She brought babies into the world who grew up and picked the white people’s cotton and ironed their clothes and cleaned their homes.
Aint Baby is 57 years old and confined to a wheelchair because of ataxia. A firebomb rips the house apart and leaves it in flames with Aint Baby trapped inside. She manages to crawl onto the porch, but her body is on fire. Miss Susie and May Liza, neighbors, pull her from her burning porch, but the women can do nothing to keep her skin from falling off or rid the air of the smell of her burning flesh. They can only warn her youngest daughter, who had run back home at the sound of the explosion, not to touch her.
In the hospital room, tubes running through her mouth and nose, Aint Baby beckons Cat with her eyes. Her lips tremble as she struggles to speak. Cat leans closer. “You want water, Mama? You gotsta use the bedpan?”
The whispery voice answers with an echoing strength: “Tote me t’ vote, gal.”
Aint Baby died from her injuries without ever knowing the feel of a ballot in her hand. Her killing was never solved. Everybody figured the killers were not looking for Aint Baby, but for her baby girl.
“My sister and everybody else said Mama wouldn’t have gotten burned up if it wasn’t for me,” Holland says. “They said if I hadn’t been involved with the civil rights workers, Mama would be alive today.
“I don’t guess I’ve ever forgiven myself.”
A few months later, Cat left her baby, Cedric, with his paternal grandmother and headed for Minnesota, where, with the help of people in the movement and their supporters, she enrolled in school and began a new life. The day she left, she carried a suitcase borrowed from Eva Brown Simpson, and guilt too large for any 20-year-old to shoulder.
*
“FROM THE MISSISSIPPI Delta” is the story of Holland’s life and that of her mother. A cast made up of three women plays all the characters. Melba Moore has played the part of her mother, as has LaTanya Richardson (wife of Samuel L. Jackson), whose performance was painfully true to life.
The play is written in the dialect Holland heard and spoke growing up, the voices that stayed in her head. It is touching and tragic, funny and victorious. “Delta” was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 but lost to “Driving Miss Daisy.” It earned Holland key support and recognition, including the help of Oprah Winfrey, a producer of an off-Broadway run. “Delta” was the reason USC President Steven Sample recruited her to teach at the university. She had been teaching at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he had been president.
“I think what I identify with most is her being able to survive without being bitter, without even being judgmental--not that that’s the way I am,” Sample says. “Sometimes we identify with people in an aspirational way: ‘I’m not that way, but I wish I were.’ ”
It took time for Holland to be open, to learn how not to be bitter. The process begins in Minnesota.
She is 23 years old. It is 1967. Her roommates are white. At one point, she is married to a Jewish man. Then it all falls apart. The memories mount, then turn to rage headed in one direction. “I hated white people,” Holland says.
During a meeting of the student government, a white male student tells her to be quiet, that she talks too much. She pulls a razor from her bosom and “cut myself to let him know I meant business.”
“I didn’t know how bad off I was,” Holland says almost 35 years later. “All the trauma from the civil rights movement. It was like war. They let us all out without any treatment, without anything.”
In the time that she spent in a psychiatric ward at a hospital near campus, doctors gave her shock treatment and encouraged her to forget, to build her life from there. What she still cannot remember is the date her house was firebombed. “I remember the day I forgot it,” she says. “I deliberately forgot [in order] to keep my sanity.”
What stopped the bitterness was the play itself. In 1979, 14 years after she left the Delta, Holland earned a bachelor’s degree in African American studies--and discovered the stage.
That year she had enrolled in an advanced playwriting class on a fluke. In that class she wrote work that would eventually become “From the Mississippi Delta.” When she read her work out loud, she finally cried the tears she had brought with her from Mississippi. In Charles Nolte’s class that day, there were no dry eyes.
Later, after one staged performance and during an astounding ovation, the bitterness and rage “evaporated into the air,” she wrote in her memoir. “It was not that [Mama’s] death didn’t matter anymore, only that it now mattered to the world, not just to me. By freeing her of my grasp, I had finally freed myself.”
The climax of her play, her book, the first 40 years of her life, comes on May 25, 1985. On this day, she participates in a ceremony marking the completion of her doctorate in American studies. On this day, her Delta has come to her. Black Greenwood has rented charter buses for her graduation and shows up at the University of Minnesota in their Sunday best. When the name of the town’s daughter is called, the audience goes wild: “Go on, Cat, walk that walk!” She takes her time walking across the stage because she is walking for Mama and the ancestors, because it has taken her 20 years to get here, because this is her, and their, parade.
“Somewhere in the hollering, I heard my Mama’s voice: ‘Step high, up yon’er, wit de birds!’ ” The family had another “doctor lady” in its ranks.
*
IN GREENWOOD THERE IS another someone whom Holland must visit. The strong brown arms that helped pulled Mama from the fire are thin and frail now. Miss Susie Brooks looks like someone’s precious doll, lying in bed, the covers swallowing her tiny body. She is dressed in light-blue satin pajamas; her nails are polished.
Memory is threadbare in some places. Miss Susie mixes up names and sees the dead among the living. But she remembers to offer comfort to her company: “Find you a chair, baby,” she orders to the entourage standing around her bed. She remembers that Cat has come home.
They are two women who belong to each other, bound by something other than blood.
“She’s speaking at Ole Miss,” Miss Susie’s daughter, Queen, explains. “Isn’t that great? Ain’t you proud of her?”
“I wish I could be there,” Miss Susie says, her eyes fixed on her guest. “You made something out of yourself. Gone on and got your education.”
As if suddenly remembering those days when such things were almost impossible, Miss Susie pauses: “How you get it, Cat?”
“Y’all just pushed me forward,” Holland says. “Thinking about you and Mama. It took me a long time.”
The women talk about family and friends and funerals and visitations. Miss Susie belongs to Aint Baby’s generation. Miss Susie says she has seen Aint Baby right in this room.
“I never will forget,” Miss Susie says. Then she begins to tell the story. A fire in 1965. A friend lost.
Holland takes Miss Susie’s hand in hers and kisses it. Now the storyteller is silent, head bowed. Holland has only one thing to say. “Thank you, Miss Susie. Thank you. Thank you.”
“Don’t cry,” Miss Susie tells her. “Don’t cry.”
*
PEOPLE IN GREENWOOD know all about Holland’s life, who she was, and who she has become. But they have never seen her like this, in a wheelchair, unable to walk without help. Long before her condition was diagnosed in 1990, she saw the signs: loss of balance, frequent falls, uneasiness walking. The illness has been like an evil avenger, tormenting her family generation after generation.
“My mother, her mother, my cousins, my aunts; my brother died from it in ’94,” Holland says, “It done ravaged my family.”
It is ravaging her life. At USC she loved to see the metamorphosis of her students. They came to her not knowing or valuing their family’s personal history. They left having uncovered the stories and characters and lessons. Since the illness has worsened, she has been on leave. That love belongs to the past.
“I can’t go back to teaching,” she says. “The students can’t understand me.”
Ataxia has taken Holland’s voice--the instrument of her storytelling--and made it sound like someone else’s. On the phone people must think she is drunk or otherwise impaired, because when she calls to handle business, they hang up or order her to have someone else call. A’Che handles the work she can no longer do: shopping for her Venice home, cooking, driving, phoning. And when she falls, as she often does, A’Che lifts her back up.
Life has a different rhythm now, set by the illness. Things like bathing and brushing her teeth take about three times longer than they used to. Walking up the stairs inside her house can take an eternity.
Still, Holland has work to do: Along with A’Che, she is writing the screenplay about her life. There is a book in the works about the Minnesota days. And there are requests from those who want to produce “From the Mississippi Delta.” Each day she reads a portion of her memoir, to remember how far she has come. She works each week with a physical therapist, so that she can go on a little further.
“There’s no sense in me saying I’m getting better,” Holland says. “I’m improved somewhat. I exercise to keep my limbs strong. I won’t ever be able to walk by myself or not be in the wheelchair.”
Two years ago, the doctor finally convinced Holland that it was time for the chair, after she had fallen twice and twice torn her rotator cuff, a group of muscles that controls shoulder movement. Each fall required surgery.
For a woman who loved to run as a child, who tried to imitate the way the older women in the movement marched--chest pushed forward, with heavy steps as if the earth was bending to their will--sitting in a chair is hard to accept. It means she is 32 inches tall.
But Holland has earned some peace. Her sister has forgiven her. Her son, Cedric, is 40 and a father of two. Yet ataxia can be fatal; now, more than ever, she cannot lollygag. “I don’t have the luxury of time,” she says. “I have to get things done if I’m going to leave something for the young folks.”
*
SUNDAY MORNING ARRIVES and Holland is in an auditorium--surprisingly full for a Sunday morning--on the campus of Ole Miss. She is talking--with difficulty--about her life, her book, representing Aint Baby and that generation.
Afterward a stream of people, almost all white, makes its way to the stage to thank her, to tell her they love her work and that they felt like they knew her mother after seeing the play or reading the book.
In the afternoon session, when it is her turn to read, Penrice reads for her in the dialect Holland had to fight with an editor to keep intact. When it is his turn to read, poet, memoirist and journalist Anthony Walton, author of “Mississippi: An American Journey,” offers her his respect.
“I am particularly touched to be able to stand here today with Dr. Holland,” he says. “I feel our presence here today signals something that happened for us, and for African Americans around the country.” Then he reads and dedicates “For My People,” a Margaret Walker poem, to her.
Now they are applauding Aint Baby’s daughter, whose spirit was not destroyed or rendered forever unreachable by the history she has lived, the daughter who through it all made something of herself and remembered to keep her heart.
Now they are applauding remembrance, in a nation that most often prefers to forget. We live as if the years chronicled on those grainy films are eons ago, as if the nation suddenly sprouted equality and we found ourselves standing at this juncture, no balance due.
Some still remember the cost. Their remembering is an act of gratitude, a gift one generation gives to the past, and to the future. They, too, will need their tombstones raised. They are training new builders.
“I think I’ll take on the cemetery as a project, hire some local kids to take care of it,” Holland muses as she leaves Oxford, “plant some flowers that’ll bloom in the spring. I’ll be making a contribution to the living and the dead.”
*
Jocelyn Y. Stewart’s last story for the magazine was a profile of Antonia Hernandez, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
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efaba115ddd163989ec9bcc9fdeec566 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jul-17-mn-54381-story.html | Hillary Clinton Denies Making 1974 Jewish Slur | Hillary Clinton Denies Making 1974 Jewish Slur
Senate candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton Sunday angrily denied having uttered an anti-Jewish slur 26 years ago, calling the allegation “politics of the worst kind.”
Clinton, who is running for the Senate representing New York against Republican Rep. Rick Lazio, was reported in a new book to have blamed Bill Clinton’s 1974 congressional race loss on his campaign manager Paul Fray, supposedly calling him a “Jew bastard.”
“It did not happen,” Clinton told reporters at a news conference outside her home in suburban Chappaqua. “I’ve never said anything like that in my entire life.”
Saying “I am very angry,” Clinton called the report “politics of destruction,” but she did not say who she thought might be behind it.
The alleged quote, contained in the upcoming “State of the Union: Inside the Complex Marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton” by former National Enquirer reporter Jerry Oppenheimer, was confirmed by former Clinton campaign worker Neill McDonald, according to the New York Daily News. It was first reported Friday by Internet gossip writer Matt Drudge.
McDonald told the newspaper that the remark, which he said he heard, was made “in the heat of battle” and was not a reflection of anti-Semitism by Clinton.
Clinton’s spokesman blasted the story as “a pathetic lie.” “It was clearly designed to divide the Jewish community,” Howard Wolfson said.
Lazio has not commented on the reports, but state Assembly leader John Faso said Clinton owes New Yorkers an explanation.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is Jewish, issued a statement saying “I’ve known Hillary Clinton for eight years, and she doesn’t have an anti-Semitic bone in her body.”
Jewish voters, the majority of whom traditionally support Democrats, make up a significant voting group in New York. Clinton leads Lazio among Jewish voters in polls, but they run about even overall.
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5827a47fce200095914c4acbf0d35191 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jul-20-me-55759-story.html | Owner of Raided Shop Awarded $1 Million | Owner of Raided Shop Awarded $1 Million
Orange County jurors awarded the owner of a Garden Grove auto body shop more than $1 million in damages after deciding that law enforcement officers raided the store without a warrant, a lawyer said Wednesday.
Jurors concluded that the team of officers conspired to violate Merritt L. Sharp Sr.'s civil rights when it burst into his shop in June 1997 in a search for drugs, said Sharp’s attorney, Jerry L. Steering.
The officers acted on a tip from an informant who told them that Sharp’s son, a parolee, was operating a methamphetamine lab from the store, Steering said.
Officers had the authority to search a parolee’s home, but Steering argued in court that searching the auto body store would have required a warrant, the Newport Beach attorney said.
Officers from the Garden Grove Police Department, the state Department of Corrections and the California Highway Patrol detained Sharp at gunpoint for 45 minutes as they ransacked the store and found methamphetamine in the son’s possession, Steering said.
Sharp, 59, has suffered from nightmares since the raid that injured his knee, the attorney said.
“If they had walked in and arrested the son and asked the dad permission to search the shop, he would have given it to them,” Steering said. “But they didn’t. . . . They demeaned him.”
A unanimous jury awarded Sharp $1 million in compensatory damages and $10,000 in punitive damages.
Garden Grove Police Capt. Dave Abrecht said the city’s officers believed that state parole agents, who led the raid, had justification to search the shop. He said Garden Grove will likely appeal the verdict.
“We’re supporting our officers,” he said. “We don’t think that they did anything wrong, and we don’t think that this case is over yet.”
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eb2f47934e5445c278956b17e52350ea | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jul-21-mn-63308-story.html | Texas Pride Is Put to the Campaign Test | Texas Pride Is Put to the Campaign Test
When God was handing out bluster and bravado, Texas must have been first in line because everything in Texas is bigger and better than anywhere else. Just ask a Texan.
They have the biggest sky, tastiest barbecue, best flag, friendliest people, lowest taxes, most oil, prettiest sunsets and, for good measure, they invented the two-step. In Texas, tourists don’t walk around in T-shirts that say “I Love Texas.” Texans do.
But a different picture of the Lone Star State has emerged in the fevered pitch of the presidential campaign. This Texas is an abyss where capitalism breeds without social conscience, the air is dirty, children go without health insurance and the execution chamber is an assembly line of mean-spirited vengeance.
The presidential race has been almost as much a test of Texas forbearance as it has of the state’s governor and GOP presidential nominee-to-be, Gov. George W. Bush. The months-long hyperscrutiny has underscored and sometimes magnified the state’s every flaw--as Al Gore, the presumed Democratic nominee, sought to do during a trip to the state Thursday.
Texas is now a benighted standard by which awful things are measured. The state that practically invented the frontier spirit, where law and order reign and “Don’t mess with Texas” stickers are state-sanctioned graffiti, is late-night fodder for Jay Leno monologues:
“Bush has a new bumper sticker: ‘Vote for me or I’ll have you executed.’ ”
“Everybody celebrates St. Patrick’s Day in a different way. Like in New York, it’s the big parade. In Chicago, they dye the river green. And in Texas today, they executed a leprechaun.”
“The entire state now stands as proxy for W. Bush, under attack for political reasons,” crabbed Molly Ivins, a syndicated Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist. “The rest of the country likes to look down on Texas as a nest of yahoos, racists and rednecks.”
Part Backwater--And Part Americana
A Democratic Party Web site advises unvaccinated tourists to stay out of Texas, given a new federal report that shows Houston has the lowest immunization rate for children among major U.S. cities. And Gore, during his stop in San Antonio on Thursday, decried the state’s low ranking in several health, education and social-service categories.
“This is a wonderful state, but I think it should be a state where it is just as easy to raise a child as set up an oil rig,” Gore said.
Texas is neither the backwater its detractors claim nor the jewel its natives tout. But it’s a bit of both.
Texas is home to the world’s largest medical center, in Houston, yet one-quarter of its residents have no health insurance. It has one of the best university systems in the country and one of the worst high school dropout rates. It is at the forefront of the technological economy, yet medieval scenes of poverty play out along its borders.
It is “Star Wars” and Charles Dickens all wrapped up in a land mass the size of France, a state with three of the nation’s largest cities and some of its most rugged country. It is a place most outsiders cannot begin to comprehend, even now, when a lot of outsiders are looking hard.
And for the most part, 20 million Texans couldn’t care less.
Environment Woes Are a Trade-Off
The clouds are big and puffy, but there is a gauzy haze over the Houston skyline. It is 97 degrees outside and a sign on Interstate 45 is flashing “Ozone watch.” So C.E. Jack Jones Jr. is watching his grandchildren ice skate inside the air-conditioned, air-filtered rink in the upscale Galleria shopping center.
Last year, Houston passed Los Angeles as the smog capital of America--thanks to an oil industry that supports half the nation’s refineries and a state government that has some of the weakest environmental laws in the land.
Houston’s general response has been to politely ask the business establishment to clean up the air. It built an air-conditioned amusement park for its children. Some people think they ought to put a mile-high air-conditioned dome over the Interstate 610 loop that circles the city.
“All we need to do is stop people from coming in here trying to tell us what to do. We can solve our own cotton pickin’ problems,” sputters Jones, a 74-year-old, 6-foot-tall Houston native. “Houston is the most air-conditioned city in the world. That’s how we fight the pollution: We keep it out with air filters.”
You can’t see the stars in Houston on most nights, but that’s all right, Jones says as his grandchildren come off the rink and plop next to him on a bench. “We can drive to West Texas once a year for that. They’re out there.”
In Texas, government is loath to regulate; it hopes industry will simply do the right thing. As a result, Texas ranks fifth in total releases of toxic substances into the air, land and water.
Indeed, there are few things Texans hate worse than a meddling government. For years, that’s how Texas got rich: exploiting its God-given resources with little regard for the environmental consequences, paying low taxes and letting the poor fend for themselves. It is a trade-off most willingly make. As the late Houston Mayor Jim McConn used to say: Sure the streets are full of potholes, but at least you have money in your jeans to fix your tire when it goes flat.
There is no state income tax and, therefore, meager social services. The governor has no power to make executive appointments. The state Legislature meets 140 days every two years, and a lot of Texans think it should meet two days every 140 years. Voter turnout in the 1996 presidential election was the nation’s third worst, with 41% of eligible citizens casting ballots.
Yet for all the flak directed at Texas, some analysts say the state’s headstrong individualism mirrors the values and problems of America at large.
“All the attacks on Texas are attacks on America in the early 21st century. Nowhere is anyone committing to education, coming to grips with the environmental problem. Seventy percent of the nation believes in the death penalty,” says Stephen L. Klineberg, a professor of sociology at Rice University in Houston.
But Texas is changing, Klineberg says. Some predict a state income tax is coming, a notion that once was as likely as making the Alamo a time-share. The Houston business community is acknowledging it must clean up the air if it is to attract new residents who have the mobility to live and work anywhere in a wired world.
Still, change comes harder to a state that was wildly successful under the old, stubborn ways. When oil prices soared in the 1970s and the country plunged into a recession, the Texas economy boomed. The rest of the country was recovering when Texas finally crashed.
Now it is finding its place in the global economy. The dig-a-hole-and-strike-it-rich days are gone, and Texas is challenged.
“When all you had to do was punch a hole in the ground and strike oil, it was easy to have the highest high school dropout rate. But you can’t drop out and invent a new microchip,” said Paul Begala, a former Clinton advisor and Virginia resident so loyal to his native Texas that he took a sack of its soil into the delivery room when each of his three children was born. “Texas is changing, but the constant is hatred of government, and that’s a mistake in the 21st century.”
Don’t Like Rules, Don’t Like Handouts
The drugstore in Johnson City, population 932, was recently put out of business by a Wal-Mart. The Wal-Mart was 22 miles away, but that didn’t matter because Texans aren’t daunted by distance and the time it takes to make the drive.
This is the fabled Hill Country, the wide open Texas of popular imagination. It’s only about an hour outside of trendy Austin, but out here things slow waaaaaay down. Johnson City is where President Lyndon B. Johnson’s boyhood home is--Lady Byrd still attends garden club functions. It is the proverbial one-stoplight town, except two people had to die in traffic accidents before the county put that stoplight in. Texans do not care much for rules.
The average income here is about $8 an hour. What people can’t buy, they barter. Robyn Henderson, editor and publisher of the Johnson City Record Courier, has traded advertising space for eggs. The local doctor once swapped an office visit for an oil painting.
That sort of determination is what helped pull Texas out of its recession, but it also holds people back. A local fund for indigent health services is rarely tapped, Henderson said, because folks don’t like handouts.
Some do without, such as Ladd Clark, a 52-year-old self-employed saddle maker who built a house on 13 acres for himself and his three dogs. They live fine, except that he is a diabetic and one of the millions of Texans with no health insurance.
He doesn’t tell that story willingly; it dribbles out over a barbecue lunch at Ronnie’s, where, locals say, “every hard-workin’ boy ends up at one time or another.” But what is essentially Texan about his situation--Clarks thinks he probably needs insulin but can’t afford it--is that he does not expect anybody to help him, least of all the government.
“If I can’t get it, I can’t get it,” he says.
Back at the newspaper office, Henderson observes, “There is a puckered-up feeling people have. They are boastful and independent--'If I can’t do it, I don’t need it and I don’t want you to give it to me.’ ”
That’s the way it’s been in Texas as long as most people can remember, a philosophy that has given the state license to provide minimal assistance to those in need. But that is not necessarily the way most Texans think things should stay.
“Texas is the nearest thing to heaven there is,” Begala says. “We love our state but we are embarrassed by our weak government. We ignore 400,000 souls in Third World conditions with no electricity and no running water. We pay our teachers less than our football coaches, and we get the results you’d expect.”
The hope of environmentalists and other activists is that this national airing of its imperfections will move Texas to change. After all, look what happened in Massachusetts, a state that long has considered itself a model of social enlightenment. After Boston Harbor’s pollution problems were spotlighted to discredit former Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis in his 1988 presidential bid, Boston cleaned up the waterway. Earlier this year, when the presidential primary drew attention to the Rebel flag flying over South Carolina’s Capitol, the long-defiant state brought it down.
What puts added pressure on Texas is that, unlike many other states, it clearly has the resources to do more. Even some defenders say as much.
“It’s a low-tax, low-service state--so shoot us,” columnist Ivins wrote. “The only depressing part is that, unlike Mississippi, we can afford to do better. We just don’t. . . .Maybe this spell in the national spotlight will inspire us to fix some things.”
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
How Texas Ranks
Texas vs. other states:
*--*
Texas Ranking Number Executions since 1976 1st 224 Adults without health insurance 1st 24.5% Children without health insurance 2nd 25.4% State prisoner incarceration rate 2nd 724/100,000 residents Births to mothers aged 15-19 2nd 71/1,000 Children living in poverty 3rd 26% People living in poverty 10th 15.1% Unemployment rate 16th 4.6% Per capita personal income 27th $26,525 Teacher salaries 29th $36,158 Per-pupil spending 35th $5,815 High school dropouts 45th 13% Homeowners 45th 62.9% Per capita state taxes 48th $1,246
*--*
Sources: Death Penalty Information Center, U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Center for Health Statistics, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Department of Education, Federal Election Commission, Federation of Tax Administrators, Annie E. Casey Foundation
Compiled by SUNNY KAPLAN / Los Angeles Times
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5e26c8bff3e15b215f86e19291e294e3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jul-22-hm-57228-story.html | 3 Ways to Top-Notch Topiaries | 3 Ways to Top-Notch Topiaries
Question: How do I create a topiary?
A.L., Fountain Valley
Answer: Topiaries are plants trained by a variety of methods to resemble an object. They are living statuary. There are three popular methods of creating topiaries: garden topiaries, moss-filled topiaries and trained topiaries.
Garden Topiaries
To create this style, place a preformed wire structure over a plant growing in the ground or a pot. Chicken wire is usually used to create the form, and the plant grows up through the structure. As it grows, it is trimmed to take the shape of the form. You see these types at Disneyland.
You can usually find a variety of wire topiary forms at nursery supply companies. When you purchase a frame, it should have an opening at the bottom large enough for the plant to grow up through it. The form should be simple and easily recognizable before planting, as it will lose some of its detail once it grows in fully.
Look for a dense, evergreen shrub with upright growth habits. Leaves should be small enough to easily grow through the openings in the wire form and maintain the integrity of the topiary shape.
In general, the smaller the leaf, the easier it is to shape. Keep in mind, however, that smaller-leaved plants will take longer to reach maturity and fill in the form. It is best to start with a small plant that can easily be coached into the frame without too much damage, rather than trying to cram a large plant into the frame. Some recommended plants are boxwood and yew.
After planting the topiary shrub in the garden or container, gently gather the plant into an upright position and tie with garden twine.
Lower the topiary frame over the plant, tucking in branches and leaves as you go; anchor it into the soil by pushing the edge of the frame into the dirt or pile soil at the base of the frame. Guide the main stem of the plant into the main portion of the frame. Once in place, remove the twine, enabling the plant branches to return to their normal position as much as possible within the frame.
Redirect lower branches out through the frame structure if possible. Trim away plant growth outside the frame to assure that the frame is covered, but the shape can be easily made out.
Tuck in or trim growth whenever needed to maintain the topiary shape.
Moss-Filled Topiaries
Easily portable, these self-contained topiaries consist of a frame filled with sphagnum moss, which is used in moss-lined hanging baskets, and an opening--often on top--with potting soil where the plant is. These topiaries can stand on the ground or a tabletop.
Heavy-grade wire or chicken wire is used to form a simple shape.
Trailing ivy with long runners and small leaves is a good plant choice because it stays close to the frame and shows the shape. You can use one large (4-inch) plant or a few smaller plugs of ivy.
Soak the sphagnum moss and the plants thoroughly before assembling. Fill the frame with wrung-out moss and hold in place with a fine-gauge fishing line or heavy thread wrapped over and over the frame. Use the moss and line to enhance the shape of the form and add character. Leave openings for inserting plants.
Once the entire frame is covered, remove the plants from their containers and gently coax their root balls into the openings in the moss. Tuck moss in around the plants to keep them tightly packed. Eventually, the roots will grow into the moss and the plants will become more stable. Use fern pins from a floral supply company or hairpins to anchor the ivy runners around the shape.
It’s important to keep a moss-filled topiary moist but not too wet. If the moss dries out, it will rob moisture from the plants. If it is too wet, it will not allow oxygen to get to the plant roots and they will die. Fertilize with an all-purpose, well-balanced fertilizer once a month. Keep in bright light, but no direct sunlight.
Trained Topiaries
This type is made of a thick wire frame in forms that plants are trained to grow up and through. You usually see these indoors and they are often made of trailing herbs.
The forms are traditional in shape and usually grown in a container. Some common forms are two or three balls on a stem, cones, wreaths and hearts. The forms usually have pointed bases used to insert into the soil and anchor the frame.
Trailing plants are typically used for this type of topiary. Ivy, rosemary, thyme and myrtle are common choices.
Choose a container plant that has long runners and plant it in a decorative pot. Insert the form base into the soil over the center of the plant. Make sure the plant is thoroughly watered so the stems are pliable. Gently wrap each plant runner around the wire, going up the form. At the end of each runner, tuck it into itself. Trim away any straggling growth that detracts from the shape of the form.
Tuck in or trim growth whenever needed to maintain the topiary shape.
* Written and researched by University of California Master Gardener Sheila Peterson of Laguna Beach.
* Omission: Last week’s Help Line on cymbidium orchid repotting was written by University of California Master Gardener Mary Steele of Laguna Niguel.
Have a problem in your yard? University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE) Master Gardeners are here to help. These trained and certified horticultural volunteers are dedicated to extending research-based, scientifically accurate information to the public about home horticulture and pest management. They are involved with a variety of outreach programs, including the UCCE Master Garden hotline, which provides answers to specific questions. You can reach the hotline at (714) 708-1646 or send e-mail to ucmastergardeners@yahoo.com. Calls and e-mail are picked up daily and are generally returned within two to three days.
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666f00e4e8eaf0f354f2f7d58019aaa6 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jul-23-mn-57847-story.html | In Mexico, Women Take a Siesta From Housework | In Mexico, Women Take a Siesta From Housework
For the first time in 23 years, Irene Ortega slept late this weekend.
She didn’t get up at 6 a.m. to fix her husband’s meals for the day. She didn’t haul out the washboard to scrub the clothes. Her husband was duly informed that he could fend for himself: She was on strike.
“He looked at me bug-eyed,” the 60-year-old street vendor reported cheerfully. “He said, ‘Why, you old copycat.’ ”
Indeed, Ortega was joining an insurrection by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Mexican homemakers who dropped their mops, hung up their aprons and boycotted their ironing boards Saturday. They were participating in one of the most unusual work stoppages Mexico has ever seen: a one-day national strike against housework, intended to highlight women’s contributions in a society known for machismo.
“This is aimed at converting the invisible into the visible,” said Gabriela Delgado, head of the Women’s Institute, referring to housework. Her institute is part of the center-left Mexico City government, which helped promote the event.
The strike appeared to be more symbolic than mass-based. But the widely publicized work stoppage captured the attention of a society in which women’s roles are rapidly changing.
Although about half of Mexican women are still principally homemakers, women have poured into the work force and universities in recent years. What hasn’t changed is their place in the home. Even those with outside jobs, like Ortega, find that they must do the household chores that traditionally have fallen to women.
That is, just about all of them.
“Before I leave home, I have to work. When I get home, I have to work,” said Ortega, a stocky woman in a bright pink sweatshirt adorned with a Virgin of Guadalupe medal who puts in 10-hour days selling music cassettes in Mexico City’s Alameda Park.
Her husband, who repairs small appliances, she says, is “macho” and only reluctantly pitches in.
On Saturday, however, he was on his own. Ortega slept in until 8 a.m., bathed, then headed out to a street stand to indulge in some consomme and barbacoa, rich lamb tacos. It was, says the mother of two grown children, her first day off from housework since 1977, when she spent a day in bed. Normally, she works seven days a week, in addition to keeping up the house. “I’m a Mexican woman,” she explained.
The strike had lofty aims. Its organizers, various women’s organizations and the city government, hope to have domestic work included in national figures on economic growth. They want men to help out more at home. And they would like the media and textbooks to portray housework as a mutual responsibility.
To press these goals, they sponsored a protest march to the traditional heart of Mexico’s political power, the capital’s giant Zocalo plaza, on the eve of the strike. About 500 women participated, banging pots and chanting: “Democracy begins at home!”
Once in the Zocalo, the protesters listened as speakers denounced the inequity: Statistics show only half of working men pitch in at home--compared with 94% of Mexican women with outside jobs.
Such data didn’t surprise Laura Quiroz, 48, a television production worker who joined the march. She had announced to her spouse that she planned to take part in Saturday’s strike. He was not amused.
“He said, ‘I don’t care. In this house, we need to eat,’ ” she said with a grimace. Women were making progress, she said, sighing. “But it’s little by little.”
Like her, Rosario Rosas, 47, a homemaker in Mexico City’s working-class Tepito neighborhood, had limited hopes for the strike. The mother of three wasn’t interested in making housework part of the gross domestic product. She hoped for something much more modest: a tiny income of her own. All the money she received from her husband was earmarked for the household, she explained.
“Men can go to the cantina with their friends. Women can’t” because they lack money and are criticized for such independence, she said.
While macho practices endure, however, the protest pointed up the dramatic transformation of women’s roles in Mexico. Birthrates have plummeted in recent decades because of extensive government family-planning programs. Young women often have twice as many years of education as their mothers. The percentage of women in the work force has more than doubled since 1970, to nearly 40%.
And women, who didn’t get the vote until 1953, have become far more politically active. In this year’s presidential race, candidates made an unprecedented effort to hold rallies with women and make campaign promises tailored to them. In Mexico City, women’s issues have been a priority, with the local government setting up special centers to address problems such as female unemployment and domestic abuse.
Delgado of the Women’s Institute said it was impossible to calculate how many women observed the strike. But the impact of the annual event appeared to ripple far beyond those who actually put down their oven mitts and brooms.
There were discussions like the one between Angelica Cruz, 45, and her husband, a 48-year-old copy editor, who were eating with their daughter at an outdoor taco stand in Mexico City.
Asked her opinion of the strike, Cruz told a reporter: “Good.”
“Good?” exclaimed her husband. He said the strike made sense only for women who held outside jobs.
His wife disagreed. “We don’t receive a salary. We work and have no benefits,” she shot back.
“Who’s paying for the tacos?” demanded her husband. Turning to a reporter, he said his wife didn’t have time to participate in the strike.
But it seemed that he wouldn’t have the last word. “It’s new--I only heard about it yesterday,” Cruz said. “But I may participate the next time round.”
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a5e9ee98ee5dc3f19dbf16108bc3d23f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jun-01-mn-36319-story.html | Pushing the Boundaries of a Free Press | Pushing the Boundaries of a Free Press
Vladimir A. Gusinsky, owner of Russia’s largest independent media group, stands virtually alone among the business and political elite here in going head-to-head in battle with President Vladimir V. Putin and his powerful Kremlin chief of staff, Alexander S. Voloshin.
His lone struggle has become a kind of litmus test of what Russia will be like under the new president. If his news outlets are forced out of business, Gusinsky told The Times on Wednesday in a rare interview, then people can conclude that Russia under Putin is no longer tolerant of an open and pluralistic media.
The tycoon’s media outlets generally have been among the most independent, objective and active in Russia in the post-Soviet era. They have been more openly critical in their reporting about the nation’s two wars in the republic of Chechnya. In the presidential campaign that ended with Putin’s election in March, Gusinsky’s media--far more than others--resisted simply echoing the Kremlin line.
Gusinsky, whose Media-Most offices were raided last month by heavily armed police commandos wearing masks, told The Times that there has been persistent Kremlin pressure on him in the last year to get out of the media business and threats to bankrupt him if he refused.
But the real showdown came in a meeting last summer when, Gusinsky said, Voloshin tried to persuade him to toe the Kremlin line in the presidential election.
“Voloshin said, as if he was joking, ‘Let’s pay you $100 million so that you won’t be in our way while the election is on. You could go on a vacation,’ ” Gusinsky said in the interview at his Moscow office, which was raided by commandos and searched by agents of the Federal Security Service, the main successor to the KGB.
The media tycoon said he informed Voloshin that he would not repeat the 1996 presidential election scenario, when Russia’s powerful oligarchs--including Gusinsky--all backed incumbent President Boris N. Yeltsin.
He told the Kremlin chief that his media--the national NTV network, Sevodnya daily newspaper, Echo of Moscow radio and Itogi magazine--would play fair. But Voloshin said he did not believe the magnate. Gusinsky said that when he declared that he had no intention of going away, Voloshin told him that meant war between the Kremlin and Gusinsky’s Media-Most.
The meeting was in the office of then-Prime Minister Sergei V. Stepashin and was attended by a Kremlin aide linked to Gusinsky, Sergei Zveryev, who was dismissed from the Kremlin staff shortly afterward. (He is not the same Sergei Zveryev who was killed in a suspected rebel bomb attack in Chechnya on Tuesday.)
The Kremlin press office could not be reached for comment Wednesday night concerning Gusinsky’s allegation.
Gusinsky, 47, is a flamboyant, elegant, larger-than-life fellow who peppers his conversation with amusing stories and adores the NTV network’s cheeky satirical puppet show, “Kukly.” He is also stubborn, certain he is in the right and scoffs at the word compromise.
“What do you mean by a compromise with Putin?” he asked. “Take ‘Kukly’ off the air? Forbid journalists to tell the truth about Chechnya? Stop writing about government corruption? Should I say the entire FSB is crystal clean and just doing its job? If this is called compromise, then this is impossible.”
Nothing, he said, short of a totalitarian coup would shut down his news outlets. But if Putin’s media policy changed overnight and viewers turned on Gusinsky’s NTV to find news programs more like what appears on a state channel, “then you’ll know what’s happened,” he said.
Gusinsky insisted that his defiance is not just about protecting his business but also about journalistic integrity and his desire that his 21-year-old son, Ilya, who is studying in the U.S., will know that his father is a principled man.
He said he told Voloshin last summer that his media would not fight back if the Kremlin declared war.
“I was told there already was a war. He said, ‘Your mass media are already writing nasty things about the government, Yeltsin, the Family.’ ” Voloshin is a key member of “The Family,” the inner Kremlin circle that has largely remained in place in the transition from Yeltsin to Putin.
In the past, Gusinsky has not been above using his media interests to fight business battles, particularly after he lost out in a 1997 struggle to get a chunk of the Russian telecommunications company, Svyazinvest.
In addition, Gusinsky is widely regarded as having close ties to Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov, who formed an anti-Kremlin alliance last year with former Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov. But Gusinsky denies the widely held view that he backed Luzhkov and Primakov against the Kremlin.
Gusinsky said Kremlin figures exerted pressure on him in the last year to sell his media business, though sometimes the message was conveyed by intermediaries.
Late last year, tax police raided one of the group’s large publishing houses, Sem Dney. Media-Most has also been under financial pressure in a legal battle with the state-owned Vneshekonombank concerning a $60-million debt to the bank. Gusinsky’s group lost a court battle and was forced to pay.
But Gusinsky sees the bank’s action as merely another instrument of the Kremlin pressure.
“All these myths about the Media-Most overdue debts were deliberately concocted by the Kremlin team in order to exert pressure on us,” he said. “After the Kremlin had realized that it can’t pressure us financially and legally--or at least showing some semblance of legality in their actions against us--then the people in masks showed up. I think that must have been a sign of despair. The FSB poked their nose into every single corner without us being present.”
Born in Moscow in 1952 to Jewish parents, Gusinsky was a theater director in Soviet times and leaped into business in 1986. He was flexible and inventive in his quest to get ahead: He drove cabs, traded goods, sold computers and office equipment and founded a metal company that made jewelry and garages.
In 1989, he became a political consultant and founded a joint venture a year later called Most, which became the base for a private bank formed in 1991. In 1994 he was approached by a journalist who had a proposal to set up a newspaper.
He created Media-Most in 1997, giving up his role as Most-Bank president.
Jesting in Wednesday’s interview, Gusinsky poked fun at that decision to go into media as “one of the most serious blunders of my life,” given the trouble it has brought him.
In the six years since he got into the media business, Gusinsky has concluded that it is impossible to have a good relationship with the authorities. But the question he has to ponder is how far the Kremlin is prepared to go in order to bring him to heel.
Gusinsky is confident that the authorities do not have the ability to bankrupt him, but neither is he willing to make a deal.
Gusinsky now spends much of his time on airplanes, shuttling between Russia, Europe and Israel. Some people, including his relatives, wonder why he does not give up tangling with Russia’s authorities and set up overseas, where his media would have greater legal protections.
“I was born in Moscow. My father is buried here, and all my relatives are buried in Russia,” he said.
“I want Russia to be part of Europe not only in words but in practice. I don’t believe an authoritarian or totalitarian regime is capable of reforms, especially in the 21st century. I am convinced we are working for the benefit of the country.”
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Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.
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9f1652321fd9c66871fa8f66ef1207e9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jun-02-fi-36497-story.html | Modus Media to Close Plant, Cut 200 Jobs | Modus Media to Close Plant, Cut 200 Jobs
Modus Media Inc., which handles customer services and manages inventories for clients, including Microsoft Corp., said it plans to cut 200 jobs, or 4% of its work force, as it closes a plant in Fremont, Calif., to consolidate its North American operations. Modus Media, based in Westwood, Mass., said it will help its employees at the Fremont site find jobs in its other plants or outside the company. The plant is expected to be shuttered by September, and its work will be transferred to sites in North Carolina, Washington and Utah. The closely held company said it’s also opening a plant in Guadalajara, Mexico. Modus Media, with 1999 sales of $697 million, provides customer support, inventory management, software packaging and computer assembly for companies such as AT&T; Corp., Dell Computer Corp., and other technology and Internet companies.
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Guide to Our Staff: Need to reach Business section reporters or editors? A guide to the section’s staff can be found at: https://www.latimes.com/bizstaff.
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c4629d79a80d0d1763316945d2f49f50 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jun-03-me-36892-story.html | Suit Alleges Harassment of L.A. Gang Peace Group | Suit Alleges Harassment of L.A. Gang Peace Group
Five prominent Los Angeles attorneys filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Friday charging that Los Angeles Police Department officers in the scandal-tarnished Rampart Division have harassed and beaten members of a group that works to end gang violence.
Lead counsel Paul Hoffman told a news conference at Immanuel Presbyterian Church on Wilshire Boulevard that the primary goal of the lawsuit is to win an injunction prohibiting LAPD officers from interfering with Homies Unidos. The group offers current and former gang members employment assistance, arts classes and a high school equivalency program.
“We’re the mirror image of a gang injunction,” Hoffman said, referring to court orders that can severely restrict the activities of gang members. “We want the police to stop acting like gangs.”
The suit also seeks unspecified damages for its four plaintiffs--Homies Unidos acting director Gerardo Lopez, Appolonio Vargas, Alex Sanchez and his wife, Christina Garcia. The plaintiffs allege that they have been searched without warrants, stopped on baseless charges or beaten by LAPD officers.
The suit names the city of Los Angeles, LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks and two Rampart officers--Mario Marquez and Jesus Amezcua. It charges that Marquez and Amezcua were among those who unlawfully detained, questioned and brutalized the plaintiffs. The acts, the lawsuit charges, often occurred when the victims were going to or leaving Homies Unidos meetings at Immanuel Presbyterian.
An LAPD spokeswoman said neither the department nor the two officers could discuss the lawsuit.
“We can’t comment on any pending litigation,” said Capt. Sharyn Buck.
The suit says Homies Unidos members have been victimized by warrantless LAPD forays into their homes, baseless charges and sexual harassment. Vargas said he has been beaten or roughed up by CRASH Officer Amezcua 10 times in the last few years after leaving Homies Unidos meetings.
“Once he kicked me in the stomach and told me he would kick my teeth out,” Vargas said.
Lopez said former Rampart CRASH Officer Michael Buchanan, who has since been implicated in the corruption scandal, beat him on his way to a Homies meeting shortly after the group began meeting in Los Angeles in 1997.
“They’ve intimidated a lot of dangerous minds that could have become positive minds,” Lopez said.
Activists said the more recent alleged abuses show that many LAPD police practices have not changed substantively since last fall, when accusations emerged of beatings, shootings of unarmed suspects and planting of drugs to frame innocent people in the Rampart Division. The Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums anti-gang unit in which most of the abuses allegedly occurred was disbanded this year.
“They say CRASH was dissolved, but its officers are still working the same neighborhoods,” said Magdaleno Rose-Avila, the founder of Homies Unidos. “You can call a Doberman pinscher a Chihuahua, but it’s still a Doberman pinscher.”
The lawsuit arose partly from the Jan. 21 arrest of then-Homies Unidos director Sanchez. Sanchez says he was harassed by Amezcua for months before being picked up on a charge he called baseless. At the time, he said, he had an alibi for a 15-year-old Homies Unidos member who was pursued by Amezcua for a gang murder the youth said he did not commit.
Sanchez, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, said Amezcua arrested him and turned him over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The INS is holding Sanchez at its San Pedro detention center while his lawyers seek his release.
The murder charge against the youth, Jose Rodriguez, was later dropped after several alibi witnesses came forward.
“Arresting an exculpatory witness is something that’s a throwback to Soviet Russia, and it has no place in the Los Angeles of 2000,” said Mark Geragos, the other lead attorney in the case.
The lawsuit says the harassment of Sanchez included an incident in which Amezcua, Marquez and other LAPD officers burst into an Aug. 6 surprise party for Christina Garcia that was thrown by Sanchez and other members of Homies Unidos.
The suit says that Marquez pushed Sanchez against a wall with a club and that people at the party were detained without justification, photographed and had their names entered into a gang database.
“When it comes to Alex Sanchez and Homies Unidos, there is no forgiveness,” said state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles). “They are punished for what they have been. He and Homies Unidos were trying to save lives. It’s as if it’s Los Angeles’ dirty little secret that we treat certain people as if they’re outside the Constitution.”
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2d7a7a64ee6b04010a2df9b997912aa9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jun-06-mn-37998-story.html | Chernobyl Plant to Close Dec. 15; Clinton Pledges Funds Toward Cost | Chernobyl Plant to Close Dec. 15; Clinton Pledges Funds Toward Cost
Fourteen years after the world’s worst nuclear accident sent plumes of radioactivity and shivers of fear across Europe, Ukraine announced Monday that it will close the entire Chernobyl nuclear plant in December.
President Leonid D. Kuchma disclosed the plans to shut the facility, responsible for the deaths of at least 31 people and the poisoning of vast acres of farmland, with President Clinton at his side. Clinton pledged $78 million to help pay for the reconstruction of a faulty concrete-and-steel structure that envelops the ruined reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl.
“This is a hopeful moment. It is also a moment when we remember those who suffered as a result of the accident there,” Clinton said.
He said the United States also will provide $2 million to improve safety at Ukraine’s other nuclear power plants, from which the nation gets 40% of its electricity. All told, a Clinton administration official said, the United States has committed itself over the past five years to spending about $300 million toward costs linked to the disaster.
While the plant’s closing had been expected, the precise date, Dec. 15, had not been announced. The administration hopes that the announcement will make it easier to collect pledges of international support at a meeting in Berlin in July.
The tragedy at Chernobyl, about 80 miles north of Kiev, began April 26, 1986. Reactor No. 4 exploded, spewing 200 times as much radiation as the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Estimates of the number of people who have died in the past 14 years as a result of the accident vary widely. Thousands are thought to be suffering from radiation-related illnesses.
An 18-mile exclusionary zone was established, forcing 135,000 people to abandon their homes, farms and villages. A 24-story sarcophagus, now badly cracked and leaking, was constructed to seal off the 200 tons of radioactive gunk--melted fuel, sand, concrete and debris from the explosion and fire. And now at least $750 million needs to be spent for a new containment system.
Radiation hot spots are still turning up. Thyroid cancers among children who lived downwind of the plant are increasing. And, coming seven years after the less-serious nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the Chernobyl accident raised grave doubts among the public about the safety of nuclear power.
On the flight here Monday from Moscow, Air Force One carried Clinton within sight of the plant, the sun glinting off the cooling towers in the summer haze.
The visit to Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, was the final stop on the president’s weeklong journey to Portugal, Germany, Russia and Ukraine. He left for Washington on Monday evening and is scheduled to leave the United States again Wednesday for a memorial service in Tokyo for the late Japanese prime minister, Keizo Obuchi.
The United States and Ukraine also signed a nuclear fuel agreement, and Clinton announced plans to begin a program to help small private enterprises get needed credit.
Ukraine once was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union; now it is something of an economic basket case. It achieved independence nine years ago during the collapse of the Soviet Union and has suffered through eight consecutive years of declining gross domestic product. Since the early 1990s, according to the State Department, the standard of living for most Ukrainian citizens has declined more than 50%.
The nuclear fuel agreement was signed by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and Serhiy Tulub, the Ukrainian energy minister. It will enable Ukraine to certify the reliability of new suppliers of nuclear fuel, permitting it to find alternative fuel sources and cut its fuel costs for its remaining nuclear power plants.
The White House touted the Chernobyl announcement as “a major milestone” for Ukraine and also for the United States and the leading industrial democracies, which have pressured Ukraine to close the facility.
It said the United States would pay to help jump-start businesses in the town of Slavutych, a community near Chernobyl, to help it overcome the impact that the plant’s closure will have on local workers, among them scientists and engineers who will lose their jobs. And the United States will work with Ukraine and the industrial democracies to gather funds to build the second sarcophagus.
Clinton made no mention of Chernobyl during a speech to tens of thousands of Ukrainians who gathered in St. Michael’s Square in Kiev. Explaining that decision, a White House aide said the president was mindful of the “political sensitivity” associated with the accident.
In the speech, Clinton acknowledged the problems the country has had to face as it seeks to establish a free-market economy.
Four times, he told the cheering crowd in Ukrainian to keep fighting.
“Communism has lost in Ukraine, but a full commitment to free-market democracy has not yet won. If your children are to live their dreams, it must win,” he said to a crowd made up largely of teenagers and 20-somethings attracted not only by the promise of a speech by Clinton but appearances by several leading rock groups. No local politicians took part in the rally.
“We reject the idea that the eastern border of Europe is the western border of Ukraine,” the president said, encouraging Ukraine to pursue eventual membership in the European Union.
The crowd had been gathering for three hours in temperatures above 80 degrees until it spilled out beyond the square, the size of a football field, and stretched at least a block down a tree-lined boulevard.
Behind the president rose the towers of St. Michael’s Monastery, the gold onion domes gleaming in the bright sun. The church, painted baby blue and white, is a replica of one that had stood at the same location before it was destroyed by Communist authorities. The formal blessing of the new structure took place last week.
“Ukraine has endured oppressors,” Clinton said. “Today the oppressors are gone. Stalin is gone. The Nazis are gone. The Soviet Union is gone. Russia is working to build a new society. But you, the people of Ukraine, you are still here, stronger than ever.”
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c788522b465270f39eeaa2e97b3f1b32 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jun-11-me-39908-story.html | ‘Wall Street of the West’ Had Its Peaks, Crashes | ‘Wall Street of the West’ Had Its Peaks, Crashes
In Northern California, they found gold in the mountain streams, but in Los Angeles there were fortunes to be made in the concrete canyons of Spring Street.
In the 1920s, as Los Angeles flexed the muscles of its new urbanity, its sturdy heart was on Spring, “the Wall Street of the West,” where banks and financial institutions prospered along with the growing city.
In those days, burgeoning Los Angeles’ most vital organ was the five-story stock exchange, for which ground was broken a week before the stock market plunge in the fall of 1929.
Its trading floor was modeled on New York’s, and its facade still is adorned with three panels, the central one showing an enthroned figure of Finance flanked by a bull and a bear. In 1957, San Francisco’s exchange merged with Los Angeles’ to create the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange, which in 1986 joined other businesses in moving to the western edges of downtown, part of the exodus that emptied the “old” downtown’s central core.
Still, the 1920s optimism is visible in Spring Street’s exuberant Beaux Arts architecture, which still can be glimpsed in the former headquarters buildings of the Merchants National Bank, Union Oil, Mortgage Guaranty, Banks Huntley and the venerable Title Insurance and Trust Co.
Many of the facades of those firms’ office buildings remain virtually intact, which accounts for Spring Street’s popularity with movie studios and television companies hoping to capture authentic period cityscapes.
More than a score of the buildings were designed by architect John Parkinson, whose Braly Building, built in 1904, started it all. At 12 stories, it was the city’s first skyscraper, and except for City Hall and the gorgeous black-and-gold towers of the now-demolished Richfield Building, it remained a giant until 1957, when a law prohibiting buildings taller than City Hall was repealed.
The Braly Building was still new when the city’s most elegant hotel--and its first class-A, fireproof building--opened its doors a block away, in 1906. The Alexandria, eight stories tall, with 500 rooms and suites, was the must-see, must-stay hostelry where the famous and titled danced under the stained-glass dome of the Palm Court.
Sarah Bernhardt, Enrico Caruso and Jack Dempsey were guests. The Alexandria’s roster of visiting presidents, present and future, was impressive: William Howard Taft; a young Theodore Roosevelt; and Woodrow Wilson, who sought local for support for the League of Nations from a suite in the Alexandria.
The Alexandria played host to Hollywood’s earliest stars and geniuses. Charlie Chaplin kept a suite in the hotel; D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks met in 1919 to form their own filmmaking company, United Artists.
The hotel soon was supplanted by more modern and luxurious hotels. The Alexandria closed, was remodeled twice, but never recovered its luster. Indeed, by the late 1980s, it had acquired another reputation altogether: City Hall was calling the Alexandria downtown’s “worst spot for drug trafficking” and moved to tidy it up.
By the 1920s, City Hall was built on North Spring Street, defining the downtown silhouette for decades, even being depicted on the city’s police badges. City Hall’s 26 stories were topped by a beacon named in honor of Charles A. Lindbergh, who made his historic transatlantic flight the year the building opened. Its public arcades and galleries--like the rest of the structure, which is currently undergoing restoration--are highlighted in gold leaf, marble and teakwood; the exquisite rotunda’s floor is a geometric mosaic of 400 pieces of marble.
Hollywood film crews are almost as omnipresent as civil servants: the building served as Superman’s newspaper, “The Daily Planet;” Martians death-rayed it in “War of the Worlds;” and giant ants scaled its California-granite facade in the sci-fi film “Them!”
Yet its reality has been even more vivid. City Hall has hosted kings and queens, presidents and generals. Sports champions have been celebrated on the same steps where the homeless have slept. In June 1945, thousands gathered to acclaim the World War II hero-generals George S. Patton and Jimmy Doolittle.
Spring Street never again became as prosperous and bustling as it was in the 1920s. In the 1980s, in a burst of hopeful bravura, more than $20 million was invested in creating the Los Angeles Theater Center as a linchpin for the street’s revival. The effort lasted half a dozen years.
The only new edifice on Spring Street is the 1990 Ronald Reagan State Building, which was originally named the Reagan State Office Building until the unflattering acronym occurred to someone. Alongside the lobby’s reflecting pool are sculptures of California cougars and of the extinct California grizzly, the bear on the state flag.
The real animals most closely associated with Spring Street were by no means native. In 1857, the young state of California seemed the ideal place to test the usefulness of those “ships of the desert"--camels. But the Army’s camel experiment failed, and after the Civil War, the surviving camels were stabled at Second and Spring streets. Later they were auctioned off or simply turned loose in the desert, where, until the turn of the century, they managed to breed both offspring and an enduring legend of California camel sightings.
In the 19th century, wild shootouts were common in front of the courthouse on dusty Spring Street. In 1870, a violent gunfight--which included the assailant’s taking a Mike Tyson-style bite out of the police chief’s ear--left half the city’s eight-man police force dead or wounded.
One of those killed was William Crossman Warren, the only police chief in Los Angeles history to die in the line of duty. And when the legal smoke had cleared, the gunman who had shattered the young LAPD over his failure to split a $100 reward three ways would go free--in part, because he was one of the department’s own.
Later, the street was the birthplace of what has since come to be called locally simply, “the industry.” Inventor Thomas Edison arrived in 1898 and filmed “South Spring Street Los Angeles California,” as one of his 60-second films, which were viewed by one person at a time for a nickel at Edison Kinetoscope Peep Shows, coast-to-coast.
Entertaining Angelenos who lined Spring Street, he mounted his giant camera on a horse-drawn wagon and in wonderfully speeded-up motion, shot the real bustling life on Spring Street.
And just how the street ended up with the name “Spring” had to do with the heart, not hydraulics. E.O.C. Ord, the surveyor charged with laying out and naming the city’s early streets, was wooing a young woman named Trinidad de la Guerra, and he had given her a nickname he later abbreviated and, in her honor, bestowed on the thoroughfare: “mi primavera, my springtime"--Spring Street.
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06e8005f23ff4da55b9d9a126a361139 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jun-12-me-40131-story.html | Humberto Cane; Influential Cuban Musician | Humberto Cane; Influential Cuban Musician
Humberto Cane, 82, a Cuban musician influential in Havana, Mexico City and Los Angeles. Born in Matanzas in 1918, Cane was the son of Valentin Cane, the founder of the influential group Sonora Matancera. Humberto played in his father’s band for several years before forming his own group, Conjunto Azul. He moved to Mexico City in the mid-1940s where he became an accomplished bassist, arranger and bandleader. It was with Cane’s band that the legendary singer Beny More began his career as a soloist. Humberto later played bass for the Trio Los Panchos and toured Europe with Tona La Negra. In the mid-1950s he led the very successful Conjunto Yeyo y Cane in Mexico. By the early 1960s, Cane had relocated to Los Angeles where he played with the Rene Bloch Orchestra and many other groups playing Cuban music in and around Southern California. On May 13 in Los Angeles.
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44ef66304bd78bff00faf9cf3e20878b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jun-14-mn-40888-story.html | Owner of Media Outlets Critical of Kremlin Is Arrested | Owner of Media Outlets Critical of Kremlin Is Arrested
The owner of Russia’s largest independent media operation was arrested here Tuesday evening, several days after an aide was warned that authorities were planning new moves against the tycoon’s Media-Most company.
The arrest of Vladimir A. Gusinsky, whose media outlets have not shied away from criticizing the Kremlin, sparked a wave of dismay and outrage among journalists and liberal politicians.
The magnate’s battle with the government came to a head just days after his right-hand man, Igor Y. Malashenko, was warned to take care or risk arrest.
“We are getting warnings they may raid Media-Most again. I am getting warnings that they may plant drugs or weapons in my car,” Malashenko said in an interview Thursday with The Times. He said the statements were conveyed by intermediaries friendly to both Malashenko and the Kremlin.
In Thursday’s interview, Malashenko also accused the FSB, the main successor to the KGB, of planting 12 rounds of illegal ammunition in his office when Media-Most’s offices were raided May 11 by Interior Ministry commandos and FSB officers. The company was hit by a similar raid in December 1994, and at that time Gusinsky was forced to flee overseas.
In Washington, the Clinton administration on Tuesday sharply criticized the arrest, which officials said appeared to be aimed at muzzling Russia’s media.
“This new action against Mr. Gusinsky will obviously draw the closest of scrutiny,” said State Department spokesman Philip T. Reeker. “I think there have been a series of events now, including [Tuesday’s] events in Russia, which have drawn international attention to the issue of press freedom.”
Gusinsky’s arrest came after an interview with The Times on May 31 in which he charged that Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s chief of staff, Alexander S. Voloshin, had declared war last year against Media-Most because of the company’s refusal to bend its media voices to the Kremlin line in advance of a presidential election held in March.
Although Gusinsky has not been above using his operation to press his financial interests, his media--which include the national NTV network, the Sevodnya daily newspaper, Echo of Moscow radio and Itogi magazine--generally have taken an independent line. They have often criticized the Kremlin, in particular over the government’s war against the separatist republic of Chechnya.
After his arrest, Gusinsky was taken to Moscow’s notorious Butyrskaya prison, rather than to Lefortovo prison, where prominent criminals are usually housed and conditions are generally better.
The prosecutor general’s office said Gusinsky faces charges of swindling and grand larceny of up to $10 million in state funds and could be given 10 years in prison if convicted. The prosecutor can hold Gusinsky for 10 days before filing charges.
In The Times’ interview last month, Gusinsky said there had been persistent Kremlin pressure on him during the past year to get out of the media business and threats to bankrupt him if he refused. “As for how far the Kremlin is prepared to go, we’ll see,” he said then.
After the news of Gusinsky’s arrest, NTV aired a two-hour live discussion with politicians, journalists and activists.
Boris Y. Nemtsov, leader of the liberal, pro-market Union of Right Forces political faction, said on the program that the arrest discredited the nation. He questioned how Putin, who is touring Europe, could talk about Russian democracy or hope to attract investment to the country.
“I think it’s an intimidation action not only directed against the independent mass media but against all Russian citizens: If you don’t behave yourself, you will be in Butyrskaya,” Nemtsov said.
He also said it was clear that Gusinsky would not have been arrested without the authority of the Kremlin. However, Putin, speaking Tuesday in Madrid, insisted that the arrest came as a surprise to him.
“It’s a doubtful gift for me,” the president said. “I hope the prosecutor’s office has sufficient reasons and everything was done in keeping with the law.”
*
Staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.
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164f313105a303143d3705f1ae060041 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jun-15-sp-41173-story.html | That Was No Dream, That Was Kobe | That Was No Dream, That Was Kobe
The kid has us in his clutches now, an entire city locked in his long arms, tucked below that sheepish grin, soaring toward that shiny basket at the far reaches of the imagination.
Kobe Bryant is flying, and Los Angeles is flying with him, our best ride in more than a decade, one final thrust before an NBA title and Los Angeles’ first professional championship since 1988.
Kobe floats, but we’re the ones who are breathless. Kobe spins, but we’re the ones who can’t look.
Kobe winced atop a badly sprained ankle Wednesday to carry the Lakers to a 120-118 overtime victory Wednesday over the Indiana Pacers in Game 4 of the NBA finals.
He gnashed for 22 points in the second half and overtime to help the Lakers overcome what had once been a 10-point Pacer lead.
He clenched for six points and a blocked shot in the final 2:33, which becomes a slightly bigger deal when one realizes that Shaquille O’Neal had fouled out and Kobe was the Lakers’ last and only hope.
But today it is the Pacers who are sore. It is the Pacers who are limping.
It is the Pacers, trailing three games to one with Game 5 on Friday here, who are now playing doctor.
“Ain’t nothing wrong with that man’s ankle,” Sam Perkins said. “I’ve been trying to tell you that.”
Or is that, there ain’t nothing wrong with what’s underneath Kobe shirt?
Because that’s what 18,345 at Conseco Fieldhouse saw when it mattered most Wednesday. Not Kobe’s ankle, but his heart, barely beating through the first half, then pounding loud enough to drown out the deafening cheers of desperation.
“This is the game I’ve been dreaming about, to be honest with you,” he said, his 21-year-old grin unchanged from when he was out there knocking down memory-makers. “I dream about it every day.”
Now those dreams will be forever part of our dreams.
Dreams about how, at the start of the third quarter, he fouled Reggie Miller because he tried to defend with his body to protect his ankle.
Dreams about how you could see him frown, shake his head, rub his hands.
Dreams about how he then took over.
He blocked Mark Jackson’s shot. He hit a fallaway jumper. Then a double-pumping jumper. Then grabbed a rebound and hit a fallaway hook.
Six consecutive points put the Lakers back in the game, and suddenly, everyone knew.
“He was taking his game to a different level, taking us to a different level,” Derek Fisher said.
“He was taking us to the brink.”
Not to mention, taking it in stride.
“I paced myself,” he said, shrugging.
Wasn’t that a Michael Jordan shrug?
“You just wait for key moments of the game to attack,” he added. “First half? This game wasn’t going to be won in the first half. But the third quarter, it needed a little push, so I pushed.”
Didn’t Michael Jordan used to talk about little pushes?
It has been the goal of many in our town to avoid using the MJ-word in relation to Kobe until he has come a little closer to earning it. Like, maybe, two or three championships closer.
But with each step toward his first title, that task becomes increasingly difficult.
Not just in this space, but even in the spaces occupied by those around him.
“I think about Kobe and his progress from the time I can remember in Utah when he shot them out of the game,” Perkins said. “Now he’s a different individual. He’s a competitor just like Michael.
And this from a nearby locker:
“I was watching what he did tonight and I was thinking about those old NBA classic films, Magic and Kareem and others just taking over games in the finals,” Fisher said. “Tonight, he took a chapter right out of their book.”
Not to mention, put a lump in throats from Camarillo to San Clemente.
So he put them back in the game in the third quarter, right? We described that, right?
It’s hard to write this stuff with eyes still wide and mouth still open.
Anyway, so the Lakers hang on until the final two minutes, and trail by one and. . . .
Of course. Kobe hit a running jump to give them a 102-101 lead.
Then the Pacers’ Travis Best acted like the Kobe Bryant of four years ago and threw up an airball and the game went into overtime.
And after Robert Horry connected on a jumper and dunk to give the Lakers an overtime lead, and after Rik Smits hit a hook shot to close the gap, and back and forth it went, then Shaq fouled out with the Lakers leading by one with 2:33 left. . . .
Well, then, everybody else essentially also left.
Squatters, all of them.
This game, at that point, belonged to Kobe. And everyone knew it.
“It was like, do not give the ball to anyone else,” John Salley said. “It was like, if anybody else shoots, call timeout and send them to the locker room.”
In Kobe’s mind, it was the same way. It is those thoughts, and what a man is able to do with them, that raises him from good to great.
“When things get thick, you look up at the fans, and everybody is waving towels, and it’s like a crescendo, you lose yourself in the moment,” he said.
“You don’t feel pressure. You are consumed by the game. It doesn’t matter what the score is, it’s just buried in the moment.”
One moment, maybe, but memories that will last for years.
Kobe hit a jumper over Miller. Kobe hit a jumper over Mark Jackson.
Then, with 28.1 seconds remaining and the the Lakers leading by one, Kobe took us for the final breathtaking spin.
Grabbed a missed shot by Brian Shaw and banked it in over his head.
“Kobe smelled it, and he lifted us,” Coach Phil Jackson said.
Smells to us like a championship.
Smells to him like, what, bubble gum?
“This was fun,” Kobe said, and there was that smile again.
Fun?
“Thank God I’m 21,” he said.
Took the words right out of a city’s mouth.
*
Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.
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2522cad3468a9387871346e932e46e2f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jun-18-me-42284-story.html | A Distinction of Note for a Musical Landmark | A Distinction of Note for a Musical Landmark
Saturday nights were party nights at Maverick’s Flat, and when the Ike and Tina Turner Revue got in the groove and Marlon Brando and Steve McQueen kicked back in the shadows, there was no other place to be on a hot Los Angeles night.
It was the late 1960s, and the Crenshaw-area club epitomized the hip, sophisticated camaraderie that blossomed during the civil rights era.
The draw was the music--groundbreaking acts on their way up, such as Earth, Wind and Fire, the Commodores and Parliament-Funkadelic, and established stars like the Temptations, the Four Tops and the Supremes.
These days the pace has slowed and the music is infrequent, but the memories of that era still resonate.
Maverick’s Flat was recently named a historic cultural monument by the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission in recognition of the role it played in the city’s pioneering black music scene. The club has joined the likes of such city landmarks as the Hollywood sign, Griffith Observatory and Farmers Market.
During its heyday, it was called the West Coast version of New York’s famed Apollo Theater, only there were no amateur acts here.
The dimly lighted, cavern-like room at 4225 Crenshaw Blvd. is now used mainly for private functions.
It was once an Arthur Murray dance studio and still retains the graceful outline of a couple arm-in-arm etched into the tiled floor of its entry hall. But the silent space echoes with a footfall that is decidedly rhythmic, stirred over the decades by musicians such as David “T-Bone” Walker, Rufus, Billy Preston, the Whispers and the Fifth Dimension.
Many of these groups got their start at Maverick’s before going on to international fame. The club and its owner, John Daniels, also exported to Europe and Asia many of the top musical touring acts of the 1970s and ‘80s. In that day the club was also the hangout of the hottest dancers in town, many of whom ended up on television’s “Soul Train,” one of the early mass disseminators of black pop culture.
Those who worked in the club and partied there say Maverick’s can claim a hand in more than a few of the musical innovations that have come to dominate American pop culture.
The Commodores appeared there before Lionel Ritchie became their lead singer and a breakout star; groups like Earth, Wind and Fire and Parliament-Funkadelic tested out the kinds of elaborate, costumed, high-energy stage shows that would become the entertainment gold standard.
Maverick’s also mirrored the city’s changing social landscape: from the 1960s era of black pride and power, to the funky 1970s of platforms and afros, to the slick 1980s, when stage shows took a back seat to recordings and the club stopped its steady Thursday-through-Sunday performances.
Throughout those decades, Maverick’s was a community resource that welcomed all races and tolerated no fools. It operated like a membership club where people strutted their best threads and stayed open till 4 a.m. because it officially served no liquor (more about that later).
Presiding over it all was Daniels, a multifaceted showman in the Sol Hurok tradition. He worked as a sheriff’s deputy after graduating from college, saved a few thousand dollars and quit at 21 to create his own fashion magazine.
One day in 1965, while living across the street, he noticed a “For Lease” sign on the two-story building and decided it would make a good office for his burgeoning magazine venture.
Once inside he realized it would make a great club. He envisioned a black Playboy Mansion, with comfortable pillows and good-looking boys and girls dancing to the beat.
An early backer was his friend Jim Brown, the football star, who provided celebrity cachet as well as investment funds.
The place opened with the Temptations. Daniels became a producer of stage shows, with groups like the Love Machine and the 7 Souls visiting 80 countries. He met the Soviet ambassador in Japan and was invited to visit Moscow at a time when few Americans had been there. He opened a Paris office that operated for years as one of Europe’s biggest importers of black musical groups.
In the 1980s, the grind of running a club began to take its toll and led Daniels to redirect his energies. Maverick’s is now a popular spot for private functions and college parties and occasionally hosts comedy nights and special music shows.
Daniels and others associated with Maverick’s talk about a family spirit that lingers today. To hear them is to be transported back in time.
Daniels, sitting in his upstairs office surrounded by photos and posters of the club’s history, said: “The historical designation is a good feeling. It’s a fit and proper postmark to what went on here throughout the years.”
Recalling the beginning years, he said: “I knew nothing about running a club, but I knew what I liked. In the early days, we had no bar, but we’d mix drinks in the water cooler, buy whatever Thrifty had on sale and had really a very pleasantly spiked punch we called a Zambezi. Nobody had to pay; they’d just walk over to the cooler with a paper cup. We were operating more as a private club, but some of the bars complained, and we quit. We then came to be known as the place that served ice-cold Coca-Cola.
“Everyone came by,” he said. “It was the kind of high-energy scene that was relaxed enough to attract the Hollywood elite. It was word of mouth. Muhammad Ali would come in and work as the disc jockey, doing his rhymes. Jon Peters would come in. The Rolling Stones, the Mamas and the Papas. Marlon Brando came in and was almost put out because he wasn’t wearing any shoes.
“Steve McQueen would drop by during the day and just stand outside by the parking meters, smoking,” Daniels said. “Then he’d come back by that night. They loved it, because nobody bothered them. They were treated the same as everyone else. Sonny Liston was considered one of the baddest guys in the world, but he would come in, get a Coke, sit on the back steps and just watch the kids dance.
“We created a history here that transcended just the Crenshaw community.”
*
Tony Lytle, 56, was one of the original members of the 7 Souls, a multiracial R&B; stage band that got its start at Maverick’s, and he later managed Daniels’ Paris office.
Now living in London, Lytle is in charge of international television sales for a British motion picture production company. He talked about those days in a telephone conversation:
“Maverick’s during that time was one of those unique events, in a unique place with a unique bunch of people who came together. When Hollywood closed down at 2 a.m., everyone wanted someplace to go. The Crusaders, Richard Pryor, Aretha Franklin, Willie Bobo, so many entertainers would appear elsewhere but liked to stop here after hours.
“We performed with most of those people. I suppose we were a sort of house band, but we’d go to Vegas and open for the Righteous Brothers and Wilson Pickett,” he said. “Maverick’s was star-studded, but if you couldn’t get a table, you sat on the floor. I remember John saying to Diana Ross, ‘Sorry, there are no tables. You’ll have to sit on the pillows.’ And she did--happily.
“I remember getting a speeding ticket once on the Pacific Coast Highway,” he said. “I had been on the road, and when I came back, the ticket had gone to warrant. At the police station, a stern man sitting behind a desk gave me my lecture. Just as I was about to leave, he turned to me and said, ‘By the way, I caught your band last week at Maverick’s.’ ”
*
Renee Gentry traveled the world as a teenager and young woman with the Love Machine. She later worked as a model and is one of the top award show trophy presenters--those poised, elegant women with the big smiles who usher the stars on and off stage. Recently, the Love Machine regrouped, and it is now working on a new recording.
“John basically held auditions for girls in the community,” Gentry said. “He’d have different combinations and found out who got along. When we started rehearsing, he had choreographers, voice coaches and producers working with us.
“The rehearsals were intense. We’d be there all night until we got it right and then have to go to school that morning,” she said. “My parents were OK with it, because it was right down the street in the community where we lived. Once they met him it was fine, and it became like another family.
“After a year we finally went out on the road,” she said. “We played 150 countries, touring with Tom Jones, [French pop star] Johnny Halliday, Manu Dibango and Julio Iglesias--and it was the best college education a girl could ever want.”
*
Twins Aileen and Madeline Randolph were teenagers when they first went to Maverick’s in the 1970s. Madeline, 44, said it was one of the few after-hours spots their parents--their father, the late Jim Randolph, was station manager at radio station KGFJ--felt comfortable letting them attend.
“The Crenshaw area was so important at the time. Politicians, doctors, lawyers lived in the area, and everyone grew up there and knew John,” Madeline Randolph said.
“He let us in for free and gave us a lifetime membership,” she said. “To get into Maverick’s for free was like getting into the White House. My mother would call and talk to John and ask, ‘Are the kids OK?’ ”
“It was a place where everyone could cross lines and feel comfortable,” she said. “Everyone seemed to relate to things going on in society then. We knew some of the people were famous, but a lot of them were just getting off the ground. We just knew they were talented and the music was really good.”
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8f934f18c8704038ef0d85673347afe7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jun-22-fi-43532-story.html | Lawsuit Alleges Wells Fargo Uses Internet to Promote Discrimination | Lawsuit Alleges Wells Fargo Uses Internet to Promote Discrimination
In a new twist on a familiar allegation against home lenders, Wells Fargo & Co. was accused Wednesday of using the Internet to discriminate against minorities and encourage racial segregation.
The allegations center on Wells Fargo’s “Community Calculator,” an online search tool designed to help prospective home buyers shop for suitable neighborhoods.
The problem, according to an amendment to a civil lawsuit in Dallas federal court, is that San Francisco-based Wells uses racial descriptions to categorize neighborhoods depicted as downtrodden areas.
The suit also alleges that the site steers “residents of predominantly minority ZIP Codes to other predominantly minority ZIP Codes.” The site also funnels residents of white neighborhoods to other white neighborhoods, the suit alleges.
Wells’ Internet descriptions include “low-income” neighborhoods, where 86% of the residents are blacks who “tend to purchase fast food and takeout food from chicken restaurants.”
Another category is “Middle Class Urban Families,” where 90% of the residents are black and wine coolers are popular. The Community Calculator identifies another low-income neighborhood category as “West Coast Immigrants,” where 70% of the population is Latino and speaks Spanish at home.
In a sample submission made by the Associated Press on Wednesday, these three categories also appeared next to “distressed neighborhoods,” where 40% of the residents receive some type of public assistance and 25% are unemployed.
“They are including some of the worst racial stereotypes possible,” said Michael Daniel, a Dallas attorney who filed the suit on behalf of the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a nonprofit group.
In a statement, Wells said that the bank is only trying to help home buyers find the right place to live.
The Community Calculator “is designed to help customers make informed buying decisions using criteria such as education levels, housing characteristics, household by type, crime index and population,” Wells said. “The Community Calculator is not designed to use race as a tool to guide home buyers’ decision making.”
Wells declined further comment until its lawyers reviewed the suit.
The suit, alleging violations of the Fair Housing Act, seeks a court order that would force Wells to remove the racial descriptions from its Web site and grant “any other appropriate relief.”
ACORN alleges data filed with federal regulators show that Wells’ mortgage unit, previously known as Norwest, compiled an abysmal lending record to minorities.
An ACORN member, Ruth Isaac of Dallas, first filed suit against Norwest in April because of statistics showing the mortgage lender made only a handful of home purchase loans in black and Latino neighborhoods from 1996 to 1998.
Daniel amended the suit Wednesday to include ACORN, which has 125,000 members, as a plaintiff and introduce the allegations that Wells is using its Web site as a discriminatory tool.
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56dbbee5f86e6d87481f4f645cbd20c0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jun-23-ca-43891-story.html | Getting in Touch With Oneself, Others in ‘Idiots’ | Getting in Touch With Oneself, Others in ‘Idiots’
“The Idiots” suggests that if Danish iconoclast Lars von Trier’s filmsare getting tougher, they’re also continuing to reward the patient.
It is yet another film made according to the rules of Dogma 95, the Copenhagen film collective that insists on location shooting, direct sound, hand-held cameras, no camera trickery, no superficial action sequences, no use of genre, no black-and-white film, no special lighting. The director is not supposed to be credited, but how could von Trier be considered anything but an auteur? (That’s like Ingmar Bergman famously describing himself as anonymous as an artisan helping build a medieval cathedral.)
A pretty though worn-looking young woman, Karen (Bodil Jorgensen), is sitting alone at a tastefully upscale restaurant, apparently somewhere in suburban Copenhagen, when an obstreperous young man Stoffer (Jens Albinus), seemingly retarded, grasps her wrist as his companion Susanne (Louise Hassing) tries to usher him out. He won’t let go, and Karen, for good reasons of her own, is not in a fighting mood.
*
This is how she ends up with a group of young people occupying an elegant but vacant villa with beautiful grounds not too far from the restaurant.
We’re thrust in medias res into a group of 11 people that’s formed a kind of makeshift commune dedicated to sending its members to public places pretending that they are retarded and sometimes also somewhat physically disabled. (They call what they do “spassing about.”)
There’s no getting around that many audiences will be offended by such behavior, but the group’s intent is not to insult those physically or mentally challenged in any manner of degree but, rather, to disturb middle-class types as much as they possibly can.
Much of this behavior is unexplained, repetitive and seemingly pointless, but eventually where the film is going becomes clearer. There is a great deal of improvisation of the unself-conscious kind, and all 11 of the film’s principals clearly must have reached deep within themselves to make so powerful an impression on the screen.
Whether this “spassing about” actually accomplishes much for those the group targets is debatable, it clearly begins to show positive effects upon members of the group. In trying to stir up others out of their complacent, conventional existences, the group finds it has lots of fun making mischief. Its people start getting in touch with themselves and each other. People begin triggering authentic emotions in each other, yielding moments of tender bonding in the face of an increasingly technological society that tends to isolate individuals from each other.
*
The venture, so informal, so provisional in nature, is just not designed to last--it’s more in the nature of an experiment than a totally committed way of life, despite the insistence otherwise of Stoffer, its natural leader. When a man, cold and determined, arrives to take home with him the daughter who had been experiencing schizophrenic behavior but now seems calm and content, the group begins breaking up, almost inevitably.
The time in short has come for these people to test their “inner spass"--to see whether they can hold on to the changes they feel within themselves when they reenter “normal” life. Gradually, the focus returns to Karen, as Susanne accompanies her back to the life she dropped out of so abruptly and, as it turns out, so understandably.
A film that has seemed rambling to the point of numbness has, in fact, already begun unobtrusively to gather focus and build tension and suspense as Karen, more significantly than all the others, approaches her moment of truth.
Interestingly, rather than cut his film to avoid the dreaded NC-17 rating, von Trier simply blacked out genitals in the film’s more frolicsome moments, which actually works as an amusing critique of censorship.
* MPAA rating: R, for strong sexuality and nudity, and for language. Times guidelines: Language, adult themes and situations.
‘The Idiots’
Bodil Jorgensen: Karen
Jens Albinus: Stoffer
Louise Hassing: Susanne
Nikolaj Lie Kass: Jeppe
A USA Films release of a production of Zentropa Entertainment2, ApS, and DR TV Danish Broadcasting Corp. produced by Svend Abrahamsen in co-production with Liberator Productions S.a.r.l., Le Sept Cinema, Argus Film Produktive, VPRO Television, Holland, ZDF/ARTE. Writer-director-cinematographer Lars von Trier. Producer Vibeke Windelov. Executive producer Peter Aalbaek Jensen. Editor Molly Malene Stensgaard. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.
Exclusively at the Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 478-6379.
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