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74e917c544dac8c59b90866cc83e04bc | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jun-25-ca-44454-story.html | How L.A. Missed the Train | How L.A. Missed the Train
A little more than three years ago, I telephoned a friend and proposed, “Let’s ride the rails.” The rails in question were those on Metro Rail. The plan was to spend the better part of a day checking out the art commissioned for subway stations and aboveground platforms on the Red, Blue and Green Lines. I’d seen some of the art on small portions of the system that I frequent, but several dozen other stations, between downtown and Long Beach, Norwalk and Redondo Beach, were newly opened or off my beaten path.
The journey lasted all day. Ride the train, get off the train, look around, catch the next train. We saw about 30 stations in all. This probably isn’t the way most people will experience art on Metro Rail, but we wanted to see a lot. And we did.
By the time it was over, I confess there wasn’t much I wanted to see a second time. There were worthwhile moments, but they were few and far between--a hallucinatory historical mural by Terry Schoonhoven at Union Station; a squadron of dreamy, flying figures suspended from the ceiling of the Civic Center station by Jonathan Borofsky; an eccentric group of enameled-steel heraldic shields that are part of Renee Petropoulos’ elaborate design for the Douglas-Rosecrans station; the translucent blue canopy Carl Cheng built over the platform at the Redondo terminus of the Green Line, which makes a commuter departing the train feel like he’s magically exited into an underwater world; and perhaps a few others.
Only one station seemed successful as a whole--Richard Turner’s transposition of a 1950s suburban tract house to a public transit platform near the airport (more about that station in a moment). By contrast, the overwhelming majority of works were eminently forgettable. Aesthetically, what had been touted as perhaps the largest and most imaginative transit art program in the nation hadn’t added up to very much.
Since that trek, five more stations have opened on the Red Line, linking Wilshire Boulevard with the fabled corner of Hollywood and Vine. This weekend, the final three stations open to the public, bringing the 17.4-mile subway to North Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.
*
The artistic results are all over the place. Some of the more appealing projects and some of the worst will be found in these last eight additions to the 50-station art program. Color is perhaps the most effective ingredient in the newest stations: Sheila Klein’s pinkish, blue and lavender interior at the Hollywood and Highland station melds a brute industrial space with something distinctly feminine, while the cheery citrus color scheme devised by painter James Doolin for the North Hollywood station comes as a refreshing surprise (imagine: tangerine structural columns).
Still, the systemwide ledger doesn’t come close to balancing on the plus side. Overall, the art in Metro Rail is mediocre. Sometimes you even find yourself staring in utter disbelief, as in one chaotic station whose entrance hall is lined with 22 text panels filled with historical information about the site--22 panels!--as if a commuter might stop in mid-journey for a good long read.
Los Angeles is home to one of the most sophisticated art communities in the world. What went wrong?
The answer is long. It begins with unfortunate choices made many years ago, when the Metro Rail idea was being born.
I’m a big fan of subways. Mass transit is important for obvious reasons, like getting lots of people from point A to point B in an efficient and ecologically sound manner. But they also change neighborhoods by changing established patterns of human traffic. The urban organism gets reorganized, as stations alter the cluster of service shops and activities that spring up around them, and as individual mobility widens. New activities get knitted into the city fabric.
Most of all, I like the way the train functions as an urban Mixmaster. The city’s vast demographic jumble is blended in a daily ritual whose utter ordinariness makes it different from the special-event mix of concerts, sporting events or other large-scale gatherings. Metro Rail is a critical cog in the larger social engine of the city, because it helps ratchet up the sense of cosmopolitanism that makes cities worth living in.
Feeling at home and alive amid the dizzying diversity of the world is essential to a vibrant civic life. No matter how many speeches get made by civic boosters, though, this feeling can’t be legislated from the top down. Mass transit is one way the frisson of cosmopolitanism bubbles up from ground zero.
A city that recognizes the power and value of cosmopolitanism would sanctify the social spaces in which it’s fostered. Alas, L.A. chose not to. Metro Rail’s aesthetic mediocrity was assured at the start, when a bureaucratic decision was made that an engineering firm, not an architect, would design the far-flung system. Designing meaningful civic spaces is an architect’s job, not an engineer’s. (For a fuller discussion of that decision and its ramifications, see the accompanying story by Nicolai Ouroussoff.)
A second fateful decision that further limited the possibilities for artistic success also dates to more than a decade ago. Responsibility for this error must be laid squarely at the feet of L.A’s art community.
Metro Rail succumbed to intense lobbying pressure from within local art circles to restrict the eligibility of artists wishing to participate in the project. Only artists living in California could submit credentials for review by the selection panels.
The problem with this self-serving scheme is not that artists in L.A. aren’t up to the task. The charms of the contributions made by Borofsky (who was then a resident, but who no longer lives here), Cheng, Turner and others is evidence enough of that. The problem is its anti-cosmopolitanism. Protectionist at heart, the restriction spoke of a parochial attitude that misunderstood what was at stake.
The locals-only restriction evolved from Metro Rail’s mitigation plan. The construction of a subway or light-rail system is hugely disruptive to everyone in its path--residents, business owners, workers--so careful steps must be taken to mitigate the disruption. Art became a cheap, handy, largely symbolic tool of the mitigation process. With promises of commissions for local artists, and promises that local committees would choose those artists, support in the vocal and influential art community was, frankly, bought.
Metro Rail’s mandated art program was budgeted at a modest $10.5 million, a drop in the bucket of what later turned into a bloated, $6.1-billion construction cost for the entire system. (As the construction cost escalated, the small art budget remained fixed.) But the selection process for artists can make or break any public commission, regardless of size. Metro Rail’s process was doomed.
A selection panel must be free--or, as free as possible--from the intense political pressure that always surrounds the process. Usually that means a panel that includes participants who do not live in the community, for informed outsiders can offer the panel disinterested, unencumbered points of view. Not only did that not happen with Metro Rail, exactly the opposite did: Non-Californians were kept off the selection panels.
Each panel, which often chose several artists for more than one station, was composed of one area artist, two local art consultants and two neighborhood representatives. With locals-only committees culling locals-only artists, the dangers of parochialism weren’t lessened--they were magnified.
More than one local artist of no particular note--and who wouldn’t stand a chance in a national competition--won commissions to design entire stations. The provincial selection process guaranteed Metro Rail’s artistic mediocrity.
Mitigation also seems to have been the source of yet another limiting decision. Artists who were selected were urged strongly to research the history of the neighborhood surrounding their particular stations and to develop their designs in response.
Themes that grow from neighborhood history may have appealed to the vanity of neighborhood meetings, but it’s no way to commission art. Theme-ing stations begs for kitsch. Numerous artists obliged, especially with tired metaphors of Tinseltown ephemera.
Historical subjects are not inherently bad, but their success depends on the specific talents of the individual artist. Richard Turner’s savvy station at Aviation Boulevard and the 105 Freeway is proof of that.
With its buff-colored stone and tropical plantings, the station design echoes the area’s vernacular architecture of the 1950s, the period when L.A’s suburbanization was in full swing. The Green Line route was partly designed to service workers commuting to the aerospace industry (now largely defunct), which helped drive L.A’s suburban boom.
On the station’s outdoor platform, Turner made passenger seating areas in the period decor of stylish domestic living rooms, with Danish Modern bentwood chairs, amoeba-shaped coffee tables and geometric rugs all translated into the durable public transit material of cast concrete. In this loopy riff on SoCal indoor-outdoor living, wind screens on the breezy platform take the shape of domestic picture windows.
Waiting for the train on Turner’s faux-suburban-home platform is like standing in one dream as it morphs into the next. Postwar suburbanization put the nail in the coffin of L.A’s once-proud mass transit system, as private automobiles replaced trolleys as the preferred mode of local transportation and urban density gave way to sprawl. Now, Metro Rail hopes to nudge cars back into the garage. Turner’s design frames these critically important shifts in our civic evolution, while our current nostalgic mania for ‘50s design gets playfully recorded.
*
This is as good as public art gets--and it’s a rarity on Metro Rail.
There’s no reason to think that local, site-specific history is the only way every artist should go. Part of the success of Turner’s work can be traced to its reliance on purely decorative motifs. Thanks to the original decision to hire an engineer rather than an architect to design the transit system, artists were handed empty concrete boxes for the subway stations and blank platforms for the aboveground trains. In essence, their job was to decorate those boxes and slabs.
Yet, no bigger prejudice exists in art today than the prejudice against decoration. The prejudice is mostly sexist, decoration being dismissed as the domestic province of women and gay men, not the rigorous public arena of masculine prerogative. For Metro Rail, the upshot was that a pool of artists already restricted by geography was also largely unequipped, either through training or critical temperament, to deal with an implicit demand for enlightened decoration.
So, what we have is a mass transit system largely composed of themed stations, most of them uninspired. Metro Rail is Universal CityWalk with artistic pretensions.
Maybe this whole fiasco can best be illuminated by one peculiar factoid: America is plunging headlong into the digital world, yet the most common art material that turns up all over the 50 Metro Rail stations is glazed ceramic tile. Painted, silk-screened, handmade, multicolored ceramic tile.
What’s up with that?
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6abeb062c22987478ff34e71ad92494b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jun-26-me-45098-story.html | Genome Research: Out of the Frying Pan or Into the Fire? | Genome Research: Out of the Frying Pan or Into the Fire?
If the 20th century was the century of physics, the 21st century will be the century of biology. While combustion, electricity and nuclear power defined scientific advances in the 20th century, the new biology of genome research, which has provided the complete genetic blueprint of a species, including the human species, will define our century.
For the first time, we will have a complete description of life at the most fundamental level of the genetic code. This map will describe for us the exact content and structure not only of every gene associated with a species, but also the pre-coded information, or “chemical spelling,” that controls when a particular gene is turned “on” or “off,” leading to a biological effect.
In humans, for example, this means we will know exactly what genetic predisposition makes a person susceptible, say, to prostate cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. We also will know how to manipulate a gene to produce blue eyes or dark skin. The human genome is 1.5 meters long and has 3 billion letters, all of which are likely to be decoded, along with the genomes of hundreds of other species, by the year 2005.
In a very real sense, then, man will reach the final frontier of his own fate when, in the Age of the Genome, he possesses the blueprint to redesign his own species. What is specific to humanity? When science intervenes to alter a genome that took millenniums to develop, where is the boundary between culture and nature? What genetic intervention, if any, is off limits? These are the great ethical questions that the new biology presents to us.
History has shown that knowledge provides the power for positive change as well as for new levels of abuse. And abuse of the knowledge of the human genome is something that cannot be taken lightly in this era of revived nationalism and ethnic cleansing from the Balkans to Rwanda.
* The Benefits: The use of genomic information over the next 10 to 100 years will utterly transform medicine and the medical industry. As elucidation of the human genetic code progresses, we will begin to find associations between minor differences in the spelling of some genes that will determine the susceptibility to disease. Once we know the exact “misspelling” that causes the susceptibility to disease, we can target that gene with a drug or virus designed for that purpose, or even “graft” a correct spelling onto the targeted gene to cure the disease. At the least, we can determine who is “at risk” for Alzheimer’s or Huntington’s or a certain cancer and monitor the person.
For example, a person who is at high risk of getting prostate cancer after age 40 can have checkups every six months. If cancer is caught in the early stages, it is curable. Prediction and prevention of disease will thus be the earliest consequences of genome research in medicine.
With this knowledge, future drug prescriptions will be given based on genetic testing and phenotypes. Genetic knowledge will also enable humanity to confront an even larger problem just over the horizon. The overuse of antibiotics during the 20th century produced strains of micro-organisms that are resistant to its cures. As a result, the world could well revert to the pre-antibiotic era when millions could die from infections. Genomics is already having an impact here. The first organism to have its genetic code completely decoded was a human pathogen. We expect to decipher the genomes of many micro-organisms, including the biggest killers, such as tuberculosis, cholera and malaria, which together are responsible for 20 million deaths each year. Each deciphered genome provides potential targets for biotech and pharmaceutical companies to develop new antibiotics.
The impact of this knowledge on the health industry can’t be underestimated. Just 50 diseases are responsible for 90% of human illness and death. If these diseases can be predicted and prevented, or treated by newly designed antibiotics, the high cost of hospital care, the most rapidly rising costs in modern economies, will plummet dramatically. Conversely, the pharmaceutical companies that develop drugs that can target genes identified with disease will come to dominate the health industry worldwide.
* Too Many Healthy: As always in science, positive advances can have negative consequences elsewhere. The world now has 6 billion people. If we save millions more and their children through genomics, how will the planet cope? In principle, responsible scientific advances that prolong life must go forward only in tandem with efforts to ensure the biosphere’s compatibility with more population. Already, population growth is outpacing food production, and the oceans are being rapidly depleted.
One answer of genomics is plant engineering, or transgenics, that can increase crop yields. The map of the genetic code of a plant will be completed by early in the 21st century. Already, genes that confer resistance to certain insects have been inserted in the corn genome, resulting in crops with over 20% increased yields. This kind of development is critical for a country like China, where there is a burgeoning population but every square inch of arable land is already under cultivation. The positive impact of agricultural transgenics for everyone becomes clear when we realize that, if food production stopped today, there would be only six weeks of food reserves left to feed the entire planet.
* Potential Abuse: The history of eugenics from early in the 20th century to the Nazis and the more recent rage of “ethnic cleansing” are certainly a warning that humanity may not be ready for the genetic knowledge we are coming to possess. Master-race efforts at “genetic cleansing” may well be imaginable in the distant future and cannot be excluded. The immediate threat, however, is genetic discrimination. While we are just now beginning to identify the spelling errors in the genetic code associated with colon or breast cancer or Alzheimer’s or Huntington’s, there will be a gap of years, if not decades, between this discovery and a cure based on the targeted gene. In the meantime, individuals so diagnosed might well be discriminated against by insurance companies that will refuse to take them on or employers who will refuse to hire them. Clearly, human rights and civil rights law will have to be updated to include this new class of diagnosed person. At this stage, one can only imagine the future potential of abuse.
Is it possible to have a new human being? Once we know the full lay of the genome map, we can, theoretically, design such a new human being. If enough money and research are put into human and bird genome research, we could no doubt put a bird’s wings on a man.These are not trivial issues. In a hundred years, all this will be possible. We have to admit that it could happen. Historical experience has shown time and again that when something becomes possible sooner or later someone does it. That is the risk.
There is no universal system of ethical criteria that says, “This is good. This is possible, but it is bad, so don’t do it.” Now that we are at the threshold of the most fundamental knowledge man can attain of his own being, such a universal system is imperative. What we propose is the establishment of a kind of worldwide “upper chamber of parliament” for this purpose. We mean a parliament in the sense of a deliberative body of experienced scientists and philosophers, let us say of 60 or so members, rotating in two-year terms to advise decision-makers in business and politics with the weight of their collective authority. This body, perhaps under United Nations auspices, would inform the public of what is at stake in a given scientific advance and propose solutions.
Everything depends on the prudent application of the accumulated wisdom of human experience to the stunning new scientific discoveries of our age. Cognizant of both the great possibilities and the risks that knowledge of the human genetic code brings, our hope is that future generations will never have to ask, with T.S. Eliot, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?”
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a33d08f23e6088911b9046c8cfde12a0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jun-26-mn-45011-story.html | Swarm of Bees Attacks Hikers in Joshua Tree Park | Swarm of Bees Attacks Hikers in Joshua Tree Park
A swarm of bees attacked a group of hikers in Joshua Tree National Park on Sunday, stinging one man more than 100 times and causing him to fall and break his leg as he sprinted for safety.
One of the man’s companions was stung more than 50 times, and two others suffered about 25 stings each, said Joshua Tree National Park Ranger David Smith.
The four dove into their car after the 11 a.m. attack--with some bees still clinging to them--and drove to the High Desert Medical Center in nearby Joshua Tree. All were treated and released by Sunday evening, Smith said. He said he did not know their names or where they were from.
Smith said that until test results come back from Sacramento he won’t know whether the bees were the infamous Africanized “killer bees,” or just normal honeybees.
Although “killer bees” are notorious for their ferocious attacks, under the right circumstances regular honeybees also can swarm, Smith said.
“We’re in the middle of a long drought right now and bees are seeking out new forms of moisture, and that’s possibly what happened,” he said.
The northwest portion of the park where the attack took place has been temporarily closed to visitors. The park is about 100 miles east of Los Angeles.
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8365f8874456334767ce47367ec532f3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jun-27-me-45326-story.html | Nieves in Sleepwalking State When Children Killed, Defense Suggests | Nieves in Sleepwalking State When Children Killed, Defense Suggests
Sandi Nieves, the Saugus woman accused of killing her four daughters by setting their house on fire, was likely in an unconscious, sleepwalking-like condition at the time of the deadly blaze, a defense expert suggested Monday at her murder trial.
“Mothers who kill their children are often in a disassociative state,” said Dr. Philip G. Ney, a neuropsychiatrist, citing research.
The sometimes rambling testimony of Ney, who is also a medical school professor, was aimed at bolstering one of the key arguments of Nieves’ defense: that the woman, now 36, was not really conscious at the time of the fire and consequently should not be held legally responsible for her daughters’ deaths.
Prosecutors contend that Nieves tried to commit suicide and kill her children out of financial desperation and anger at the men in her life. In the weeks before the fire, a boyfriend left her, and she was engaged in a child support battle with an ex-husband.
On the night of June 30, 1998, Nieves allegedly gathered her children in the kitchen-den area of their rented Saugus house for a slumber party, and, while they slept, started a fire.
Her four daughters, Kristl and Jaqlene Folden, 5 and 7, and Rashel and Nikolet Folden-Nieves, 11 and 12, died of smoke inhalation. Her teenage son, David Nieves, survived.
Nieves is charged with four counts of first-degree murder and the attempted murder of her son.
If convicted, she faces a possible death penalty.
In court Monday before San Fernando Superior Court Judge L. Jeffrey Wiatt, Ney described Nieves’ mental and physical condition in the days before the fire.
Nieves, who had an early childhood history of epilepsy, was also taking a combination of phentermine, a prescription diet drug, and Zoloft, an antidepressant, Ney said.
“The two drugs don’t go together,” Ney said. He likened the possible effect on the brain to a car’s motor that is being accelerated to top speed just as it’s running out of gas. “It’s really, really tough on the biochemistry of the brain. . . . It can kill you,” he added.
At the time, Ney said, Nieves was also hormonally unbalanced because of a recent abortion.
All those factors made her more vulnerable to a “disassociative state” in which “You’re basically unconscious,” Ney testified, when questioned by Deputy Public Defender Howard Waco.
Ney likened that condition to sleepwalking or sleeptalking, where a person can sound logical and perform complicated tasks but is not actually aware of what he or she is doing.
As an expert witness, Ney is forbidden by California law to refer directly to Nieves’ mental state at the time of the crime, but he was allowed to testify about what a hypothetical person with Nieves’ exact conditions might have experienced.
Someone like Nieves was likely to have had a severe “change in neurochemistry,” Ney said. “All of these things disinhibit a person . . . so you can do all kinds of wild and bizarre things.”
*
In earlier testimony, Dr. Robert Brook, a neuropsychoanalyst, testified for the prosecution that a lease signed by Nieves, in which the divorcee claimed to be married and said she had only three children, showed she was dishonest.
“It’s an example of the defendant’s manipulation of facts,” said Brook, when questioned by Deputy Dist. Atty. Beth Silverman. Also Monday, Judge Wiatt fined defense attorney Waco $1,100 because he made an inappropriate objection in court. Since the trial began, Wiatt has sanctioned Waco four times and has fined him more than $3,000, according to the court.
Waco said Monday he didn’t know if the public defender’s office would reimburse him for the fines.
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85415ddec760600fc993c59600851937 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jun-28-ca-45524-story.html | ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT REPORTS FROM THE TIMES, NEWS SERVICES AND THE NATION’S PRESS. | ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT REPORTS FROM THE TIMES, NEWS SERVICES AND THE NATION’S PRESS.
STAGE
‘Bullets’ on Broadway: Woody Allen and Marvin Hamlisch are teaming to create a musical-theater adaptation of Allen’s 1994 film “Bullets Over Broadway,” according to the New York Daily News. Allen’s movie poked fun at Broadway in its comic look at a struggling young playwright who makes compromise after compromise to get his play staged in 1920s New York, only to have a prominent gangster--and his play’s financier--prove to be a better writer than the author himself. No directors, lyricists or librettists were mentioned. The film version of “Bullets” used standards by a host of Broadway composers, including Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, Jerome Kern and George Gershwin. The News reported that Jean Doumanian and Marty Richards will produce the show on Broadway. Hamlisch, who is preparing for an August workshop of his latest musical, “The Sweet Smell of Success,” starring John Lithgow, is set to begin writing the score to “Bullets Over Broadway” in the fall. “I’m very excited about the project,” Hamlisch said. “Between now and August, let the lawyers worry about it. Then we’ll worry about it.”
ENTERTAINMENT
Humanitas Nominations: NBC’s first-year drama “The West Wing” captured two nominations Tuesday in the 60-minute category for the annual Humanitas Prizes, cash awards given to the writers of TV shows and feature films whose work “enriches and enlightens their audiences.” The third nominee in that category--the winner of which will receive $15,000--was another first-year drama, ABC’s “Once and Again.” Nominations in the network TV movie category (a $25,000 prize) went to CBS’ “Anya’s Bell,” CBS’ “Joan of Arc” and ABC’s “Tuesdays With Morrie,” and for cable to A&E;'s “Dash and Lilly,” TNT’s “Freedom Song” and HBO’s “A Lesson Before Dying.” In the category for 30-minute TV shows ($10,000), the nominees were episodes of NBC’s “Frasier,” NBC’s “3rd Rock From the Sun” and WB’s “The Smart Guy.” The feature film nominees ($25,000) were “The Straight Story,” “The Insider” and “The End of the Affair.” Winners will be announced July 12.
TELEVISION
Sweet ‘Jesus’: ABC’s “Peter Jennings Reporting: The Search for the Historical Jesus” generated high ratings Monday and plenty of debate. Drawing 16.6 million viewers, it was the network’s most-viewed documentary since a 1993 report about the Waco Branch Davidian conflict, and easily gave ABC the highest ratings of any network during its 9-11 p.m. time period. ABC’s Web site, meanwhile, received 27,349 questions for Jennings, who chatted about the show after its airing (the site’s second-largest chat ever, behind “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?” bride Darva Conger). By Tuesday afternoon, it had posted nearly 6,000 messages about the show.
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Damon and Affleck Get Real: Academy Award winners Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (“Good Will Hunting”) are joining the reality-TV game, serving as executive producers of “The Runner” for ABC. The network gave the show a 13-episode order but didn’t disclose exactly when it will premiere. The series, which Affleck and Damon said they spent six months developing, will follow a single contestant as he or she tries to cross the country without being recognized or identified by viewers. The show will be produced by LivePlanet Inc., the actors’ production company, in association with Touchstone Television.
RADIO
A Little Bit Rock ‘n’ Roll: Orange County radio station KIKF-FM (94.3) has dropped its country format after 20 years because its audience was dwindling. It switched as of Sunday to an adult-rock format dubbed “Cool 94.3--Today’s Mix.” KIKF-FM is owned by Carlsbad-based Astor Broadcasting, which owns a handful of radio stations in Southern California. Astor plans to keep playing country music on its Ontario station, KIKA-AM (1510).
QUICK TAKES
Hollywood’s El Capitan Theatre has become the first movie theater to offer online ticket purchasing, it was announced Tuesday. The new service, available now, allows moviegoers to buy seats by visiting https://www.elcapitantickets.com, and then print them on their personal computers. . . . Glenn Close, Harry Connick Jr., Rade Sherbedgia, Jack Thompson and Robert Pastorelli will star in the new version of “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific,” a three-hour movie that will air next season on ABC. Production is set to start on July 10 and will be filmed entirely on tropical locations in Queensland, Australia, and Moorea, Tahiti. . . . Oscar-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss will receive the lifetime achievement award at the Hollywood Film Festival during an Aug. 7 banquet at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills. Festival founder and executive director Carlos de Abreu said Dreyfuss’ “stellar performances are a perfect example of what actors should strive for.” The festival will run Aug. 2-7. . . . Ellen Ketchum will replace the departing Martin Kagan as executive director of the Alex Theatre in Glendale. . . . Disney/Pixar’s “Toy Story 2" will hit stores on video and DVD on Oct. 17. . . . Singer Vic Damone, in the midst of a national farewell tour, canceled appearances this week at an Atlantic City casino after being hospitalized with flu-like symptoms. Publicist Rob Wilcox said Damone, 72, felt ill Monday morning and was admitted to an undisclosed New Jersey hospital. Damone canceled scheduled appearances through Friday.
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57cdb51f68de37367dbc0f927c02155d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-mar-01-mn-4198-story.html | U.S. Judge Allows Arizona to Accept Internet Votes | U.S. Judge Allows Arizona to Accept Internet Votes
Opening a potentially controversial era in American politics, a federal judge Tuesday gave the Arizona Democratic Party the green light to hold the nation’s first binding election that will accept ballots from the Internet.
After nearly 10 hours of testimony, U.S. District Judge Paul G. Rosenblatt ruled that the Voting Integrity Project of Arlington, Va., failed to demonstrate that online voting would have a discriminatory effect on minority voters, who experts say are generally less affluent than whites in the state and are therefore less likely to have access to the Internet.
The Virginia group put one Latino and two black registered Arizona voters on the stand who claimed they would be disadvantaged by an online vote because they lack convenient Internet access. But Arizona Democratic Party Chairman Mark Fleisher, who also testified, said the party’s aim was to expand voting opportunities in a state where just 12,800 of more than 800,000 registered Democrats cast votes in the largely uncontested 1996 Democratic Party presidential preference vote.
“I am not persuaded that there is a ‘digital divide’ that will result in racial discrimination,” Rosenblatt said before denying the project’s request for a preliminary injunction to block the Arizona Democratic Party from accepting ballots cast over the Internet.
Lawyers for the Voting Integrity Project made an unsuccessful bid to persuade Rosenblatt to stay his order and indicated that they may make an expedited appeal of the decision before the state’s Democratic primary on March 11. (The Arizona Republican Party held its primary on Feb. 22).
Online voting would be available for 96 hours from Tuesday to March 10, whereas those wanting to cast a ballot in person at the polls could only do so March 11.
“We believe the digital divide creates a political divide . . . that will result in separate and unequal” voting access, said the group’s lawyer, M. Miller Baker.
The court hearing on the so-called digital divide comes during an election year in which the Internet is playing an increasingly significant role.
Not since 1952, when Republican presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower first experimented with the then-fledgling medium of television, has a new means of communication had such potential to affect political discourse in the United States, experts say.
Already, nearly a dozen private companies are lobbying hard to cash in on the estimated $2-billion worldwide market to offer online voting services. And the specter of online voting has sparked enough interest that on Monday a group of computer experts calling themselves the Internet Technology Voting Alliance announced an effort to develop technical standards for Internet voting.
“We see a lot of interest in political participation online,” said Kathleen DeLaski of AOL, who oversees Web sites launched in recent months that are devoted to government and political coverage. “Just since the New Hampshire primary, we have had several million people logging on to look at our election guides.”
Although California and Washington are considering online voting, the technology faces an uphill battle against state election officials who have been resistant to changes in election procedures.
Oregon, for example, only recently authorized mail-in ballots, and a report released last month by California Secretary of State Bill T. Jones concluded that Internet voting is potentially vulnerable to fraud and abuse.
Tuesday’s court ruling came after the U.S. Department of Justice gave its approval of online voting in Arizona, a state that has been monitored by the department for violations of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Under the procedures set up by the Democratic Party, registered Arizona Democrats will to vote over the Internet using a special pin number code that they obtain by mail. Voters can also cast their ballot by mail-in vote or go to polling places in person on March 11.
Nevertheless, some critics say there are not yet sufficient online voting protections to prevent fraud on the freewheeling Internet.
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503b499f97eb3c778645f82949090b48 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-mar-02-me-4490-story.html | Seepage, Odor Confound People Who Live Near Tar Pits | Seepage, Odor Confound People Who Live Near Tar Pits
Most Los Angeles residents are aware that tar has been seeping up through the earth at the La Brea Tar Pits since prehistoric times, creating a rich fossil record that is now a major tourist attraction. What they don’t realize is that the thick, gooey muck is also a perennial source of irritation for many neighbors like Michael Daniels.
During heavy rains, tar regularly invades the elevator shaft of Daniels’ condominium complex on South Stanley Avenue, a half-block south of the Wilshire Boulevard tar pits. The sticky goo gives off a powerful odor and sometimes threatens to ooze into the elevator, creating a major headache for residents.
Last weekend, for the third consecutive year, residents enlisted their maintenance man to scoop the tar into 55-gallon drums, which collect in the building’s parking garage. The problem is that no one knows exactly what to do with the stuff.
Daniels said he’s gotten the runaround from city officials and received conflicting information from numerous public and private agencies. The last time residents hired a waste disposal company to haul the tar away it cost them $3,000.
“If you live here, you’re liable to get rid of it,” Daniels said. “The question is, what is our property and what isn’t? How far do you have to go underground before it stops being your property?”
When it comes to tar bubbling up out of the earth in the Miracle Mile district or anywhere else, the lawbooks offer little guidance.
“I wish I could give you one pat answer,” said James Langley, assistant director for the Bureau of Sanitation, which oversees sewage and storm drainage. “Generally, unless the property owner can show that it’s someone else’s responsibility, they’re pretty much stuck with it.”
Tar-related problems are nothing new in the neighborhood surrounding the tar pits and the adjacent Page Museum--a satellite of the county Natural History Museum--that showcases fossils recovered from the site. Tar has been known to seep onto nearby streets and parking lots and even to leak into storm drains. “It used to be that people would walk through the park and then walk through our galleries and track the tar on the floors,” said Keith McKeown, spokesman for the nearby Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Oil/water separators are often used by neighborhood apartment buildings to keep oily ground water from seeping into underground parking garages. The filters then pump the clarified water into city storm drains.
The problem is that the leftover oil can’t be taken out with the trash. Buildings must pay disposal companies to pick up the oil and haul it to receiving facilities, where it’s refined and sometimes recycled for profit. The removal cost for property owners can be as high as $300 per barrel.
Just how hazardous is the tar? No one seems to have a straight answer.
“The state does not view it as being a toxic substance, but it is considered hazardous,” said Ed Santiago, an associate engineer with the California Division of Oil and Gas. “If you talk to the Fire Department, they might have a different view of it and the city might have a different view of it.”
Daniels wonders if the tar could pose long-term health hazards for residents of the building’s 12 units, particularly in light of the heavy fumes. But some might argue that residents should have known what they were getting into.
“It’s inherent in that part of the world,” said Bonnie Booth, a manager for DeMenno/Kerdoon, California’s largest oil recycler. “Common sense might dictate that I don’t want to live next to a tar pit. I don’t want to live across the street from Chevron, either.”
All the confusion has left Daniels exasperated.
“We’ve had this problem for a long time. People in our building get active about pursuing things, then rainy season ends and we say ‘Well, we made it through another year’ ”
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e062e6e75e7646c7783f0ad9b19afeb1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-mar-12-ca-7856-story.html | Digging for the Truth | Digging for the Truth
When Erin Brockovich entered his life, Harold Bollema was going through stressful times. He had been forced to leave his 80-acre dairy farm in Hinkley, a rural hamlet near the California desert community of Barstow, where Pacific Gas & Electric Co. operates a pumping station for natural gas that runs along a pipeline from the Texas Panhandle to the San Francisco Bay Area.
He was living in a small apartment with his wife, Jackie, and their kids, waiting to find another plot of land on which to start a new dairy, when Brockovich showed up at the door in the early 1990s with her boss, a curmudgeonly attorney named Ed Masry.
They were there to talk about contamination of the ground water in Hinkley caused by PG&E.;
Bollema’s dairy sat across the street from the facility, where for years PG&E; collected chromium-tainted water used as an anti-corrosive in the pumping plant’s cooling towers. The water would be dumped on the desert floor in unlined ponds and leach into the town’s water table. The townsfolk drank the water, inhaled its vapors when taking hot showers and watched their children run through the chromium-laced sprinkler water on hot summer days.
Bollema thought something was odd when two pregnant women living nearby suddenly suffered miscarriages.
“If it was a fluke, I don’t know,” the dairyman recalled, “but the doctor said, ‘Maybe you should test the water.’ It seemed like everything just mushroomed out. PG&E; kicked me off the dairy and took the lease over. It takes about a year for my business to be relocated. I had to sell my cows and move to another place. I was living in a little apartment when [Brockovich and Masry] just came driving up and said, ‘We are looking for you.’
“I was out of business six months because of what PG&E; did to us,” he added. “They bought the dairy and took the lease out from under me and told me I only had so much time to get off the property.”
Today, Bollema operates a new dairy in Ontario, but he says he wouldn’t wish those earlier times on anyone.
“It wasn’t fun,” he said. “You are just starting a new family and find that water might be the worst thing you drink in your whole life. You know what I’m saying?” Looking back, he added: “If it wasn’t for Ed, I think we would have all been screwed over.”
It was Brockovich who, while working as a file clerk in Masry’s law office, stumbled upon Hinkley and its toxic water. By 1992, she was meeting with residents and, eventually, brought in Masry to talk to small groups of residents and then address a town meeting. Through it all, Brockovich was the key liaison between the townsfolk and the lawyers.
In 1993, a lawsuit on behalf of 650 plaintiffs was filed against PG&E; charging that the chromium pollution was responsible for a host of ailments, from various types of cancer to severe digestive disorders. Three years later, after arbitrators awarded $130.5 million in the first 39 cases, PG&E; decided to settle for a whopping $333 million.
The utility had argued that in any population of 650, you were going to find these kinds of problems. Still, PG&E; felt that settling the case would resolve what might be a protracted and costly legal battle.
It is this case--Anderson vs. Pacific Gas & Electric Co., No. BCV00300--that forms the backdrop for the new Universal Pictures-Columbia Pictures film “Erin Brockovich,” starring Julia Roberts in the title role and Albert Finney as Masry.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Susannah Grant, the film tells the behind-the-scenes story of how the real-life Brockovich, a twice-divorced mother of three, used her driving sense of justice, her innate smarts and some saucy sex appeal to take on a $21-billion corporation--and win. Produced by Jersey Films, the movie is scheduled to be released nationwide Friday.
Her name is now trumpeted in TV commercials and emblazoned on billboards across America: ERIN BROCKOVICH. But behind the Hollywood hype is a compelling real-life legal drama involving one of the world’s largest utilities.
“It was a lot of long hours, a lot of work and a lot of reading,” Brockovich said of the investigation she began nearly a decade ago. “But it was the best education I ever had.” The real story, she said, was “what happened to these people and this case.”
The film, she noted, is “very accurate from the standpoint of how I got to know Ed, how I started working on Hinkley and how I got into the water board.” But, she noted, it is “surreal” to watch Roberts portray her on the big screen.
The film comes amid a firestorm of controversy over the creative license Hollywood takes when depicting actual events. A flurry of finger-pointing, for example, engulfed such recent films “The Hurricane,” “The Insider” and “Boys Don’t Cry” as well as the 1998 legal drama “A Civil Action.”
To be sure, Hollywood history is replete with examples of filmmakers taking liberties with history, whether it’s a drama like “Mississippi Burning,” which took heat for focusing on the efforts of two white FBI agents over the mostly black-led civil rights movement, or a string of bio-pics like “Frances,” “The Jolson Story,” “The George Raft Story” and “Perils of Pauline.”
But the intensity of the debate seems to be increasing. In recent weeks, for instance, Universal had to defend the accuracy of “The Hurricane,” which was based on the 20-year struggle by imprisoned boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter to prove his innocence in a sensational murder case. Families of the murder victims and others involved in the case charged that the filmmakers distorted real events. Some believe the raging debate harmed the movie’s Oscar chances, since its only Academy Award nomination went to Denzel Washington for his portrayal of Carter.
Similarly, the Walt Disney Co. came under fire for the accuracy of “A Civil Action,” starring John Travolta. The film was based on Jonathan Harr’s best-selling book about a courtroom battle waged by eight Boston-area families against two corporations they held responsible for their children’s deaths. Their suit alleged the companies--Beatrice Foods and W.R. Grace & Co.--had polluted the ground water in East Woburn, Mass., where eight children had died of leukemia. As a response, W.R. Grace sponsored a Web site warning moviegoers: “By the time a story leaves Hollywood, it may be a long way from the reality that inspired it.”
Could “Erin Brockovich” be the exception?
While PG&E; has yet to view the film, the utility seems to be adopting a less hostile view than one might have predicted. A PG&E; spokesman said recently “our attitude from the start has been that [the movie] is a dramatization.”
“It is an entertainment vehicle,” spokesman Greg Pruett added. “We probably have taken a little different approach than other companies” in how PG&E; reacts.
When told of the comments, Soderbergh said he believes the utility is taking the right approach.
“If they are smart, they will lay low,” the director said. “You do not want to engage in a debate about the subject of this movie. I tried to be evenhanded about how this whole issue was handled. I could afford to be. The facts were the facts. I didn’t need to make it worse than it was. They did what they did.”
The movie itself had a curious genesis.
Carla Santos Shamberg, one of the film’s two executive producers, was visiting her chiropractor, Pamela DuMond, one day when DuMond mentioned that she had another patient, named Erin Brockovich, whose story might make a good movie. Since she hadn’t been a filmmaker long enough to become jaded, Shamberg invited Brockovich over to the house to listen to her story.
“She shows up at the door and she’s a babe,” Shamberg recalled. “She’s wearing black spiked heels, a black leather miniskirt and black leather vest and has this big blond hair. She’s like 5 feet 11 in high heels. I said, ‘What is this?’ but I found that [she] is really smart. She’s not a bimbo. She sat down in my den for two or three hours and tells me this story. A third of the time she breaks into tears because she couldn’t spend a lot of time with her children [during the case] and the plaintiffs’ stories were heartbreaking.”
Everything about Brockovich’s story smacked of being a great movie, the producer said.
“The sympathetic plaintiffs; a heroine who was down and out but who had a body like one of those girls in those video games that all the boys play, you know, those vixens. Plus, she has a sidekick, kind of an older guy, maternal, curmudgeonly, and she came along and jump-started his life.”
But the filmmaker also leveled with Brockovich about what could happen if she eventually agreed to sign over the rights to her story to Hollywood.
“I said, ‘Look, this can be a brutal experience for you,’ ” Shamberg said. “ ‘Once I have the rights, I own you. If I want, I can dress you in a tutu and dangle you from the Chrysler Building!’ ” But, she added, Jersey Films has a lot of integrity when it comes to making movies.
“Erin said, ‘I want the story told,’ ” Shamberg recalled. “Erin has no ego. She has faults, she’s not perfect, but she is always about the case.”
*
It so happened that screenwriter Grant, who co-wrote Drew Barrymore’s Cinderella tale “Ever After” and wrote Sandra Bullock’s upcoming film “28 Days,” showed up at Jersey’s offices one day looking for a new writing project.
“I’m in a mood to write a story about a kick-ass broad,” she told Jersey’s production executives, who mentioned they had a legal story they wanted to develop.
After meeting Brockovich over lunch, Grant set to work. From the beginning, she and the producers were in agreement that the film should not be a courtroom drama.
“What I love about Erin is she loves defying people’s expectations of her,” Grant said. “She says, ‘People look at me and think I’m dumb and it gets them every time. As long as they think I’m dumb, I’ve got the advantage.’ ”
To ensure the script’s accuracy, Grant said she spent weeks poring over the trial transcripts and water board records and reading notes that Brockovich had made during the investigation. Grant even spent a day roaming around Hinkley and recalled the shock of seeing the clear line of demarcation around the pumping station between living and dead trees.
“What I really liked about the movie was that they didn’t pull any punches with PG&E;,” said Masry, a 67-year-old grandfather, now in his 40th year of practicing law. “They said it the way it is.”
From the outset, Shamberg pictured Roberts in the lead role, but her husband, Michael Shamberg, who along with Danny DeVito and Stacey Sher is partnered in Jersey Films, said that was a longshot.
The project already had been turned down by three big-name directors when someone at the ICM talent agency--Carla Shamberg still doesn’t know who--slipped the script to Roberts’ agent. Jersey was overwhelmed when the agent called to say Roberts was interested in playing the lead.
Enter Soderbergh.
Carla Shamberg said Soderbergh was approached because Jersey already had a relationship with him on its critically acclaimed film “Out of Sight,” and because he was known as a good director with women.
“I knew he would treat this character with a lot of respect and not make her silly,” Shamberg said. “He did it with Jennifer Lopez [in “Out of Sight”] and Andie MacDowell” in “sex, lies, & videotape.” She also noted that Roberts, as with any big star, had a major say in choosing the director.
Soderbergh said that what appealed most to him about “Erin Brockovich” was working with Roberts on a film that would clearly expand her horizons as an actress, and also developing Brockovich’s character.
“It’s rare to find human-sized heroes,” Soderbergh said, “and I was just captivated by her and her relationship with Ed and the fact that it was a story about people who made certain sacrifices and stood on certain principles without being a screed.”
*
After Soderbergh came on board, a meeting was held months before principal photography began in mid-1999 to go over the third draft of Grant’s script. Attending that meeting were Masry, Brockovich, Soderbergh, Carla Shamberg, Grant, Jersey co-Chairman Sher and an attorney for Universal.
At the meeting, Soderbergh went through the script line by line with Masry and Brockovich, asking, “Did this happen? If not, what did happen?”
“I just thought the facts, in and of themselves, were compelling and didn’t really need to be over-dramatized,” Soderbergh said. “I was just going on my gut. This is a true story that happened not long ago in California. I felt I needed to be prepared for when people said, ‘Did that happen? Were you aware of that?’ ”
Perhaps the biggest change in the script to come out of that meeting, Shamberg recalled, was the decision to place even more emphasis on the role Masry played. For example, the filmmakers initially had Brockovich gathering the signatures of Hinkley residents to join in the lawsuit, but that was changed to show Masry’s actual involvement.
“They wanted to make a realistic, true story and I believed it,” Masry said of Jersey Films. “I said to myself, ‘If they want to do a true movie, it can only help. It can’t hurt.’ ”
Still, the studios knew they were treading on dangerous ground. So, in Grant’s screenplay, which received uncredited touches by screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, real-life Hinkley residents became composites. One of those is Donna Jensen, played by Marg Helgenberger, the first resident Brockovich approaches in the movie. The two principal big-city lawyers who joined Masry in fighting PG&E; were condensed, for dramatic purposes, into one man, portrayed by actor Peter Coyote.
Soderbergh added some intriguing factual touches: A judge in Barstow who delivered a key ruling in the case, for instance, is played by the actual judge, and the real Brockovich appears as a waitress. Masry also can be seen sitting in a booth behind her.
Some scenes were altered slightly for dramatic effect, such as one in which a PG&E; attorney is afraid to drink a glass of water after Masry and Brockovich inform her that it came from wells in Hinkley.
“That actually happened at a trial,” Michael Shamberg explained, “which is even a better story, but we didn’t show any trial stuff.”
In the film, Roberts’ character is injured in a traffic accident and hires Masry to represent her. In real life, it was Masry’s partner, Jimmy Vititoe, who handled the case and who offered Brockovich a job at the law firm.
The film also depicts a mysterious older man who follows Brockovich around and finally breaks his silence while they’re seated at a bar. She thinks he wants to pick her up, but he actually wants to tell her that he had worked at the pumping station and had been ordered to destroy documents.
In real life, according to the plaintiffs’ attorneys, there were two “Deep Throats,” a man and a woman. The man was actually the bartender, not a patron. They were allegedly told to go to the “Boneyard,” where all the facility’s historical records were kept, and take everything to the dump. They used five pickup trucks over several nights between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. so no one would see them, attorneys said.
“Those were all the records over how much chromium was put in the system between 1952 and 1986,” said Walter J. Lack, one of the lead plaintiffs’ attorneys.
Brockovich said she was sitting in a bar on Highway 58 when an older man she had met before approached her and, just like in the movie, she thought he wanted to pick her up. Instead, he told her of the “Boneyard.”
In the film, Roberts darts out of the bar to phone Masry with the exciting news.
“That’s exactly like I did,” Brockovich recalled. “I bolted out of there. I told him I was going to the restroom because I didn’t want him to leave and I immediately ran and called Ed.”
In the film, Finney tells Roberts that the case has grown too big for his small law firm to handle, so he seeks out the help of bigger law firms. In real life, those law firms were Girardi and Keese in downtown Los Angeles and Engstrom, Lipscomb & Lack in Century City. Together, the firms poured $12 million of their own cash into waging the legal fight against PG&E.;
The real lawsuit nearly sank Masry financially.
“My law firm had literally run out of money,” Masry recalled. “I had 30 to 60 days of operating capital left when Lack and Girardi stepped into the fight. If they hadn’t stepped in, we would have been defeated.”
Thomas V. Girardi and Lack recently attended an advance screening of “Erin Brockovich” and said they found it remarkably accurate.
“The single most memorable effect the movie had on me,” Lack said, “was how it captured Ed Masry’s great generosity and kindness and the agony he went through before finally making a commitment [to the case]. In terms of costs, it was a drain on him. He’s an older man, not in good health. He really put his whole life into this case. He mortgaged his home, didn’t take other cases. . . . By the time he came to me, he was out of money.”
Brockovich today admits she was angered when Lack and Girardi initially entered the case because she had been working hard to uncover things and here were these two big law firms suddenly coming on board to help direct the case.
“I wasn’t sensing it from the legal and financial standpoint, just from the emotional impact,” she recalled. “I was uncovering the deceit.”
Lack and Girardi said they loved Coyote’s portrayal and were even amused that the character’s arrogance somewhat resembled Lack’s. “Yep, that’s me,” Lack said with a laugh.
As for Brockovich, Girardi still marvels at the way she was able to bond with the people of Hinkley.
“The truth of the matter is, she single-handedly was the liaison between that town [and the lawyers],” he said. “We did send other employees out [to Hinkley] for one reason or another and they were never as warmly treated as Erin, but they were always welcomed.”
How did the real Brockovich compare to Roberts’ portrayal?
“She was exactly like Julia in the movie,” Girardi said. “She would come back with those quick retorts” like the scene in which Finney says some of the women in the office aren’t comfortable with the way Roberts’ character dresses.
“Is that so?” Roberts replies. “Well, it just so happens I think I look nice and as long as I have one ass instead of two, I’ll wear what I like. If that’s all right with you.”
Masry said he thinks the filmmakers have accurately captured the relationship between Brockovich and himself.
“Erin and I had our arguments,” he said. “We had our bad times and we had our good times. When I first heard that Julia was going to play Erin, I thought, ‘What a horrible mistake.’ The only movies I had seen Julia in, she was kind of like a vestal virgin. You know, ‘Runaway Bride’ and ‘Notting Hill.’ I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the film. She did a wonderful job.”
And, how does Roberts’ sexy attire in the film compare to that worn by the real-life Erin?
“If anything,” Masry said, “Julia wore longer skirts.”
*
Epilogue: Litigation against PG&E; continues. Lack said that on Nov. 27, trial is scheduled to begin in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of 1,600 plaintiffs arising out of the same sort of allegations in Hinkley, only this time involving PG&E; pumping stations in Topock, a remote site on the Arizona state line, and Kettleman City in Kings County, as well as some former Hinkley residents who came forward later.
“Kettleman is almost a repeat of Hinkley,” Masry said. “The thing that is staggering about Kettleman is that they knew in 1967 they were using chromium, and clear into the 1980s they didn’t stop using it.” PG&E; declined comment on the pending litigation.
Girardi said all three law firms are busy pursuing various other toxic cases and that Brockovich, now director of research at Masry’s Westlake Village law firm, recently went to Hawaii on a case.
Masry described Brockovich today as “the Perry Mason of toxic investigators” and noted that the two of them have crisscrossed the country probing water pollution cases.
Brockovich is now remarried. Her three children--17, 15 and 9--are much older than depicted in the film. “Elizabeth was my baby in diapers when this started,” she recalled.
Carla Shamberg said a woman who worked as a crew member on the film happened to be discussing it with her mother, who mentioned that the crew member’s father had always thought he was poisoned by the water in his town. Now, Brockovich is on that case, too.
But notoriety comes with a price for the now 39-year-old Brockovich. Shamberg said that Brockovich went into a drugstore recently and the pharmacist became flustered when she flashed on Brockovich’s name.
“She gave Erin a painkiller and Erin later started getting sleepy and realized, ‘Oh, my God, I got the wrong prescription!’ ” *
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eade32e914c5b95c55edff84c10e8158 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-mar-12-tm-8048-story.html | “Louie, Take a Look at This | “Louie, Take a Look at This
Of the thousands of treasures Huell Howser has revealed during a decade of KCET’s “California’s Gold” and “Visiting . . . With,” one remains to be seen: The man behind the camera.
In Howser’s search for the offbeat and overlooked, Luis Fuerte has filmed him perched atop the Golden Gate, feeling his way through abandoned Red Line tunnels and attempting to eat menudo (with the cameraman’s mother). Shouldering a 26-pound Betacam--never a Steadycam--Fuerte moves over uneven ground, capturing Howser’s roaming interviews in beautifully composed shots that seem to defy editing. One shot, moving backward through crowded downtown streets, went 16 minutes uncut.
Howser’s gee-whiz enthusiasm, freed by Fuerte’s nimble footwork, gives his shows a “You Are There” quality. One invites us along; the other takes us. “Louie, take a look at this,” Howser calls. And we look, too. It’s made “Louie” TV’s most profoundly invisible celebrity since Carlton the doorman on “Rhoda.” “If I’m walking with a man,” Howser says, “it could be anyone, and people ask if it’s Louie.”
Meeting the soft-spoken Fuerte, one finds the kind of dark, bearded, matinee good looks that the camera adores. His love affair with the camera began in his hometown of San Bernardino when, fresh out of the Navy and pursuing engineering, he picked one up in his campus TV station. “It was the feel of the camera,” he says, “the excitement of being in the studio.” He met Howser at KCET when the former Tennessean arrived from KCBS-Channel 2 in the late ‘80s and invited him to shoot a new show about California. They’ve worked together since, developing a remarkable chemistry through hundreds of half-hours.
“I know his moves,” Fuerte, 58, says. “By the tone of his voice, I can anticipate when he needs to break.” The most famous segments are the dangerous ones, like window-washing downtown L.A.'s 73-story First Interstate building. “I don’t like heights, but I’m really not thinking about it,” he says. “I’m concentrating on making things work. Looking at lighting, checking sound, listening to Huell.”
Fuerte has fallen only once, but he’s always followed along. Now, however, he’s taking the lead: producing, shooting and editing “Romantic America,” a travel series for couples that is in development, and working on documentary projects. How long will the team keep spinning “Gold”? “I’ve said this year’s it,” Fuerte acknowledges. “Not only because of my schedule, but carrying that camera around has taken its toll.”
Winner of six Emmys, a Golden Mike and an International Monitor Award, and an inductee into the Southern California Latino/Native American Hall of Fame, Fuerte is proudest of seeing his son and daughter graduate from college. Occasionally he sheds his anonymity at speaking engagements and student career days.
“I grew up in the barrio,” he says, “and know it’s important that these kids meet people who can show that they can do it, too. And, when another cameraman says, ‘I’ve seen your work and I love what you do,’ that’s more rewarding than any trophy.”
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644258f9751a6e0849b54d48a5770d49 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-mar-21-fi-11003-story.html | Huntington Beach Mall Solidifies Remodel Plans | Huntington Beach Mall Solidifies Remodel Plans
With the wrecking ball aimed at the aging Huntington Beach Mall, the center’s owner said Monday that its vision for the property has crystallized--and the renovation price has doubled.
As envisioned, the new “Italian village” will include a variety of stores, high-end restaurants and a 16- to 18-screen theater. Names of prospective new tenants are not being released.
The cost, initially figured at $50 million, has jumped to $100 million, said Douglas Gray, president of Irvine-based Ezralow Retail Properties, which bought the center from MaceRich Co. in Santa Monica last year for $50 million.
If it’s standard practice for a redevelopment to cost more than expected, it’s also common for projects to take longer to unfold than anticipated. The redevelopment was supposed to begin in January. Now Ezralow says it will begin asbestos abatement in May, and demolition won’t start until at least September. The new Crossings at Huntington mall is expected to be open by the end of 2001.
Virtually all of the main mall will be torn down. A separate section of the center, which includes Barnes & Noble Booksellers and Combest General Store, will stay open and get a partial face-lift. The exterior of Mervyn’s site, which is not owned by Ezralow, will also be renovated, Gray said. Montgomery Ward, also separately owned, is not part of the remodel.
It’s still not clear what will happen to many of the mall’s current tenants. Most small retailers will be gone by April 30.
“It’s really going to create financial hardship for the majority of them,” said Stuart Wallach, a Newport Beach attorney who was hired by a group of tenants as tensions mounted between retailers and the landlord.
Indeed, some still have no place to go.
“Everybody’s scrambling for leases,” said Elizabeth Berg, co-owner of Three Old Crows gift shop. “We don’t know what we’re going to do.”
Jewelry store Facets 58, a tenant for 15 years, expects to reopen in June at Seacliff Village shopping center, currently under construction at Goldenwest Street and Yorktown Avenue in Huntington Beach.
Ezralow is still negotiating with the Huntington Beach Mall’s largest tenant, Burlington Coat Factory, which said it expects to stay where it is or be shifted to a new spot in the rebuilt mall.
“They can’t tear it down as long as I’m in it,” said Bruce Hackel, Burlington’s regional manager. “And I’m not moving until we have our negotiations completed.” Burlington has about 25 years left on its 30-year lease, he said.
But Gray said the current Burlington won’t be spared.
“There’s no question that that store will come down,” he said. “The question is whether Burlington will be part of the new development or not.”
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cded26ee0aa103947d43912f4784be51 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-mar-21-me-11178-story.html | 6 Arrested in $18.9-Million Robbery of Delivery Firm | 6 Arrested in $18.9-Million Robbery of Delivery Firm
Federal authorities announced Monday the arrest of six men accused of making off with $18.9 million in a daring armed takeover of the Dunbar armored truck depot in Los Angeles in 1997.
The FBI forensics lab in Washington was credited with a major breakthrough in the case, tracing a small plastic taillight lens found at the crime scene to a rented truck used to cart off the loot.
The mastermind was identified as a Dunbar security guard, fired just one day before the Sept. 13, 1997, holdup.
Prosecutors said Allen Pace III, 30, recruited the five other defendants and provided them with a floor plan and a key to the Dunbar depot on Mateo Street, along with radio headsets that enabled them to talk to each other during the robbery.
Wearing ski masks and armed with handguns and a shotgun, the bandits roughed up several employees inside the depot and tied them up with duct tape, but no shots were fired.
Police officials called it one of the biggest cash robberies in local crime annals. The Dunbar company, based in Baltimore, and Lloyd’s of London posted a $125,000 reward for information leading to the robbers’ arrest and conviction.
Most of the stolen money was in $20 bills destined for automated teller machines across the city.
Assistant U.S. Atty. Alka Sagar said Monday that FBI and Internal Revenue Service agents have traced about $4 million of the loot, which was used to buy homes and automobiles and to set up a business front through which money was laundered.
The defendants also dropped a few hundred thousand dollars at the gambling tables in Las Vegas, she said.
But the bulk of the stolen cash is still missing. The FBI and IRS issued a plea for help in finding the money.
Pace, of Compton, and co-defendants Thomas Lee Johnson, 27, of Las Vegas; Freddie Lynn McCrary Jr., 29, of Arleta; Terry Wayne Brown Sr., 37, of Los Angeles; and Erik Damon Boyd, 29, of Buena Park, are scheduled to go on trial May 25. They are being held without bail.
They are each charged with conspiracy to commit the robbery, using a gun during a crime of violence and interfering with interstate commerce, crimes punishable by up to 45 years in prison. Johnson faces an additional 24 counts of money laundering.
The sixth defendant, Eugene Lamar Hill Jr., 33, of Bellflower, pleaded guilty last Dec. 22 to conspiracy, using a gun during a crime and income tax evasion. He is to be sentenced in July.
FBI agents traced Hill to a rented U-Haul truck used by the bandits to cart off the money.
After the robbery, investigators searching the loading dock area at the Dunbar depot found a plastic taillight lens that did not belong to any company vehicles. The FBI forensics lab in Washington was able to match the lens to those used on 14-foot-long U-Haul trucks.
But the lead was of little use until an FBI informant named Hill as a possible suspect. FBI agents discovered in short order that Hill had rented a 14-foot U-Haul truck a day before the robbery and returned it a day later.
When he was arrested in September, Sagar said, Hill still had in his possession a stack of bills bearing the same money wrappers as those taken in the Dunbar robbery.
The prosecutor said Hill confessed and named the others. Sagar said the defendants used straw buyers to acquire at least 10 homes during public auctions of foreclosed properties. Some of the houses were rented out while others were occupied by the suspects’ families, she said.
She said IRS agents traced about $2 million to a company established by Hill and Johnson to launder the stolen money. Operating under the name of Rain Forest, the pair used most of the $2 million to buy an incinerator that purportedly burns trash without causing air pollution, and paid themselves a salary totaling more than $100,000, she said.
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59aa9ba587b30e7da7c518c8e3b27c2a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-mar-28-sp-13389-story.html | It’s Real Hollywood Ending for Transformed Henderson | It’s Real Hollywood Ending for Transformed Henderson
Thomas Henderson went to Nau’s Enfield Drugs in Austin, Texas, shelled out $100 for lottery tickets--as he often does when the payoff catches his attention--and didn’t give it another second’s thought until he received a call last Wednesday night.
It was a relative, telling him that the winning ticket had come from Nau’s. A hopeful Henderson checked the numbers on his tickets against the winning ones and discovered that he had it. He was $28 million richer. Actually, after a cash option penalty and taxes, the amount he will receive is $10,433,690.
He isn’t complaining, having dealt before with the Internal Revenue Service. It once confiscated one of his Super Bowl rings and would have taken the two others if he had been able to find them.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that there is no second act in an American life. Not even a mind as fertile as his could have imagined that anyone would ever come along like Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson.
He was born 47 years ago this month in an Austin hospital to a single mother, who raised him mostly by herself. He had a stepfather, until Henderson’s mother shot and wounded him after he’d beaten her in a drunken rage. Henderson recalls the shame of frequently going to school smelling like urine.
He never could be shamed on the football field. He didn’t have the grades for a major university, but Gil Brandt, the Dallas Cowboys’ player personnel director who had a knack for finding players where no one else could, found Henderson at Oklahoma’s Langston College.
Brandt, one of the first talent evaluators to use a computer to analyze players, was staggered when he read Henderson’s printout. He wasn’t as big as some outside linebackers, but he was faster than many tailbacks, could dunk over a goal post--which he once did at the Coliseum after scoring a touchdown in a playoff game against the Rams--and had an IQ as high as, or higher than, the players the Cowboys like to draft from Stanford.
Their first-round draft choice in 1975 didn’t disappoint on the field. Lawrence Taylor, perhaps the greatest player ever at the position, said that he was inspired to wear 56 because it was Henderson’s number.
As a bonus, since he promoted himself, the Cowboys’ vaunted PR machine could devote its resources to other players. Henderson wasn’t exaggerating much when he said he could “talk a hungry cat off a fish truck.”
In his most famous interview, a few days before Super Bowl XIII in Miami, he said the quarterback that the Cowboys would face, Pittsburgh’s Terry Bradshaw, “couldn’t spell cat if you spotted him the C and the A.”
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Years later, after his autobiography, “Out of Control: Confessions of an NFL Casualty,” was published, we learned that his breakfast of champions on that morning included cocaine.
He had played Super Bowl XII high, trading two tickets for an ounce of coke before the game and snorting it in a locker room toilet stall. He would play Super Bowl XIII while flying from the liquefied coke he sniffed on the sidelines from an inhaler.
But he didn’t usually play games during his five-year career with the Cowboys high on cocaine. More often, he played them high on amphetamines and marijuana.
During the 1979 season, he was wearing his illegal smile on the sideline during a loss to the Washington Redskins. Tom Landry, who had an infinite amount of compassion but not patience, fired him.
Fitzgerald also once wrote, “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”
Henderson played one more season, with two different teams, and was attempting a comeback with Miami when he broke a vertebra and retired.
By then, he already had made history, as the first NFL player to publicly confess an addiction to drugs and alcohol and admit himself to a rehabilitation center. Some people guessed he wasn’t serious when he was seen smoking a joint on the steps before entering.
He still hadn’t hit bottom. That happened in Long Beach in November 1983--he had moved to Southern California in a futile attempt to become Hollywood’s Hollywood Henderson--when he lured two underage girls to his place with the promise of cocaine.
Once there, he was alleged to have held a .38 caliber pistol on one and forced her to perform oral copulation while the other, who was in a wheelchair, watched.
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Even before spending two years and eight months inside the Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo after his conviction for the sexual offense, he underwent treatment at CareUnit in Orange that he says prevented him from meeting the same fate as John Belushi.
Henderson has fond memories of his three Super Bowls--he eventually found one of the missing rings--but says they are less important to him than the more than 16 years he has spent playing every day in the “Sober Bowl.”
He returned to his old neighborhood in Austin after prison and started the East Side Youth Services and Street Outreach. He never earned more than $175,000 in a football season, money that mostly disappeared up his nose, but has found ways to provide. Proving that he is still not allergic to attention, he staged a hunger strike in 1997 to raise money for a track. With $250,000 in donations, he built the Yellow Jacket Track & Field.
Equally important is the message he delivers with evangelistic zeal. People who have heard his anti-drug sermons to schoolchildren say they tingle when he starts them chanting, “You have a choice!”
He announced last year his candidacy for the Austin City Council so that he would have an even more influential pulpit. He was stopped by a state law forbidding convicted felons from appearing on the ballot.
But, as Henderson often tells the children, when God closes a door, he opens a window. More than $10 million just dropped through his window.
“A blessed event,” he calls it.
He celebrated by going to the nearest 7-Eleven and buying a sausage and egg biscuit, powdered doughnuts and a pint of milk. He says he will take care of his family with some of his millions but put most of the money into the community.
What would you expect? Hollywood always has been partial to happy endings.
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Randy Harvey can be reached at his e-mail address: randy.harvey@latimes.com.
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dc6d95c59bfe258237f266c90c99ffda | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-mar-29-mn-13836-story.html | With Losses Mounting, Mossimo Turns to Target | With Losses Mounting, Mossimo Turns to Target
Clothes designer Mossimo Giannulli, who wooed well-heeled patrons with stylish beach and urban wear, announced Tuesday he will begin selling his clothes in discount Target stores next year.
The move, part of the Irvine apparel company’s effort to shore up its flagging operations, stunned some industry experts, who saw it as a marked departure from the high-profile owner’s earlier strategy.
“He envisioned himself as the next Ralph Lauren--he talked about the ‘Moss lifestyle,’ ” said Steven Martin, who has followed the company since it went public four years ago. “I don’t think Mossimo ever envisioned himself making public appearances at Target stores.”
His company, Mossimo Inc., announced that Chief Executive Edwin Lewis has resigned and that it will dismiss “a significant number” of employees as part of a restructuring. The company has about 100 workers.
The company also said its losses more than doubled in the fourth quarter and that it is trying to arrange interim financing to continue its operations until the licensing deal with Target begins to generate revenue next year. Without such financing, Mossimo’s accountants question whether it will be able to continue as a going concern, the company said.
The bombshell came on the heels of what had seemed to be a turnaround for Mossimo, which had struggled in recent years after attempting to move too quickly to fashion-oriented apparel from its more casual beachwear roots. Last October, the company reported its first quarterly profit in two years.
Giannulli, 36, has been in the front seat of a wild roller coaster ride since he took his company public in 1996 and the stock shot to $50 a share from $18 in just a few months. Within a couple of years, the stock had plunged to the single digits as industry experts chided the designer for making a major misstep by switching gears too quickly.
In a bold move to right the company, Giannulli in late 1998 gave up half his share in the business to hire Lewis, former chief executive of Tommy Hilfiger Inc., for the top job at Mossimo. Industry experts hailed the move and the stock quickly moved upward.
The stock closed Tuesday at $6.50 a share, down 6 cents, on the New York Stock Exchange. The restructuring was announced after the close of regular trading.
Industry experts were divided Tuesday about what the latest about-face means for the company, or for the high-profile designer who gave it his name.
Some said that teaming with Target could be a wise strategy, assuming that Mossimo can get critical interim financing.
“Target is today the most modern, coolest big box retailer in America,” said Dick Baker, chief executive of surf wear maker Ocean Pacific Apparel Corp. in Irvine.
Others said the licensing deal probably won’t be particularly lucrative and questioned whether Mossimo will be able to obtain the needed financing.
“If this was such a good deal, somebody would have lent the money up front,” said Martin, president of Slater Asset Management.
In any case, the move from department stores such as Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s to a discount chain is a comedown for Giannulli, Martin said.
Mossimo officials could not be reached for comment.
The company, in a prepared statement, said it decided on the new strategy after hiring consultants to consider its options. With the company departing from its traditional method of operation, Lewis opted to resign as president and CEO. He will continue to advise the company, Mossimo said.
Under the deal with Target, Mossimo said, Giannulli will contribute “design services” and license his company’s trademark to the retailer, which will sell men’s and women’s apparel bearing the Mossimo brand in all 923 Target stores nationwide.
Target may expand its Mossimo line to include other products, such as housewares, accessories and fragrances, Mossimo said.
Mossimo said the agreement includes a three-year sales guarantee totaling $1 billion, beginning next February. Mossimo will receive a royalty based on the sales.
“By joining forces with what we believe to be one of the leading retailers in the market today, we can further leverage the strength of the Mossimo brand and significantly expand our reach,” Giannulli said in a statement. “I truly believe this represents the next big evolution in retailing--dominant retailers working together with marquee brands toward a common goal.”
In an attempt to drum up more business, mass merchandisers have tapped name-brand designers to turn out shirts, towels, tea kettles and the like for them. Wal-Mart, Target and Kmart have lassoed a stable of big-name designers in their ongoing attempt to transform themselves from low-budget to bargain chic.
Kmart sells Martha Stewart bedding, towels, napkin rings and scores of other items at its stores, helping burnish Kmart’s once dowdy image.
Target has reinvented itself by hiring upscale designers to do low-cost versions of their products. Michael Graves, known for his work for respected design firms such as Alessi in Italy, offers Target such items as stainless-steel teakettles and wood patio furniture, for example.
At the same time, Mossimo has been struggling to hold its own in the department store arena.
“They got in the door [but] it’s brutally competitive in that space,” said Jeffrey Van Sinderen, an analyst with B. Riley & Co. “It sounds to me like this probably was a good strategy for them.”
For the fourth quarter, Mossimo’s losses widened to $7 million, or 46 cents a share, from $2.6 million, or 17 cents a share, a year earlier. Sales dropped 12% to $7.4 million.
Giannulli started his company in a garage in 1987, selling neon-colored volleyball shorts and T-shirts. The company grew to a $72-million annual enterprise in eight years before going public in February 1996.
After his company began having trouble, Giannulli first attempted to right it himself. Later, he enlisted the help of industry heavyweights, including turnaround specialist John Brincko, who slashed costs, got rid of workers and moved Mossimo to a much smaller, less expensive headquarters.
Next, Mossimo hired Lewis, prompting other Hilfiger executives to follow him to Irvine.
Even if the Target deal is successful, the company faces other hurdles.
Some observers, for example, questioned how Mossimo’s other licensees will react to the agreement with Target, since they are used to selling Mossimo goods at department stores. Existing license agreements will remain in effect.
“How are they going to sell their products to the department stores if Target’s going to be selling the product?” Martin asked.
Susan Crank, chief executive of Lunada Bay Corp. in Anaheim, the licensee for Mossimo swimwear, said she was “stunned” Tuesday when she heard the news.
“I’m still gathering my thoughts as to how Lunada Bay will be proceeding in the future,” she said. “This is a lot to absorb in one day.”
Times staff writer Marc Ballon contributed to this report.
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463a37ceebd032dbf883b0f56d202043 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-mar-30-ca-14006-story.html | ‘N Sync Sets Industry Record With ‘Strings’ | ‘N Sync Sets Industry Record With ‘Strings’
Maybe ‘N Sync fans thought the song title was “Buy, Buy, Buy.”
The teen pop group made music industry history on Wednesday when its new album, “No Strings Attached,” registered the biggest single week of sales ever. The disc, led by the radio hit “Bye Bye Bye,” sold 2,415,859 copies, more than doubling the mark set by the Backstreet Boys last summer.
“No Strings Attached” joins the Backstreet Boys’ “Millennium,” Garth Brooks’ “Double Live” in 1998 (1.08 million) and “The Bodyguard” soundtrack in 1992 (1.06 million) as the only albums to break the six-digit mark in a single week.
“I’m still reeling, to be honest” said Barry Klein, president of Jive Records, ‘N Sync’s label. Klein was among the Jive officials in New York who used a satellite hookup Wednesday to pop champagne with ‘N Sync, which is on a publicity junket in Tokyo.
The Orlando, Fla., group was helped by an intense media blitz. From the cover of Rolling Stone to appearances on “Good Morning America” and “Saturday Night Live,” the group has been hard to escape. ‘N Sync also performed Sunday on the Oscars broadcast, which reached 79 million U.S. viewers.
The pinup pop group just made history at the box office as well. On Saturday, it sold out 51 concerts--more than a million tickets--to set what Ticketmaster says appears to be a one-day record. Included among the sellouts: ‘N Sync’s June 9 stop at the Rose Bowl.
The ‘N Sync sales barrage ended the six-week reign of Santana’s “Supernatural” at No. 1. That album, which has now surpassed 8 million in total sales, falls to No. 2 with 266,000 copies sold.
A pair of debuts finished No. 3 and No. 4. Ice Cube’s “War & Peace Vol. 2 (The Peace Disc)” sold 185,000 copies, while Pantera’s “Reinventing the Steel"--the group’s first studio album in four years--sold 161,000 copies. The only other Top 10 debut was “WWF Aggression” at No. 8, featuring various rap artists’ takes on wrestler theme music.
Other notable debuts include Ja Rule’s new rap ensemble the Murderers, who open at No. 15 with “Irv Gotti Presents the Murderers.” The Universal Music Group title was late to stores after the label insisted that violent lyrics depicting police and homosexuals be excised.
Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” debuts at No. 89 with 18,000 copies sold. The disc teams the singer-songwriter with the London Symphony Orchestra for standards such as “Stormy Weather” and “At Last.”
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187cf3077b92535d9892d77eceab38e4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-mar-31-mn-14500-story.html | Those Bagel Shops: Are They Toast? | Those Bagel Shops: Are They Toast?
Bagel shops, home of one of the hottest low-fat food fads of the 1990s, appear to be headed the way of the frozen yogurt stand as more Americans indulge in decadent foods such as doughnuts and ice cream.
On Thursday, the country’s largest bagel chain, Golden, Colo.-based Noah/Einstein Bagel Corp., said it may not have enough money to keep the company operating unless it finds new financing.
The chain, which owns 539 bagel stores nationwide, including more than 50 Noah’s Bagel locations in Southern California, said in its annual report that it will be unable to pay off its $125 million in debt that comes due in October.
The company closed 14 shops across the country last year, including one on Main Street in Santa Monica.
Its biggest rivals have suffered equally in the last couple of years, victims of their own overexpansion as well as slackening bagel sales. Compounding the problem for bagel shops, analysts say, is that bagels can be had almost anywhere these days, from supermarket bakeries to the local Dunkin’ Donuts store.
“There has been an explosion in the availability of bagels,” said Ronald Paul, president of Technomic Inc., a Chicago restaurant consulting firm. “And to the consumer, it’s not worth going out of their way for that.”
The bagel goes back to 1683, when it was invented as a tribute to Polish King Jan Sobieski, who saved Austrians from Turkish invaders. In this century, the bagel, a bread that is boiled and then baked, became a staple of Jewish homes.
The bagel’s modern surge in popularity began about a decade ago with the attempt by many Americans to flee high-fat, high-calorie doughnuts. Although they boast a low fat content, Bagels come packed with more than 300 calories.
The bagel’s brief run of mainstream popularity may be a victim of booming economic times and high living, experts say.
“People seem to be less concerned with fat and the health content” of foods, said Orange County restaurant consultant Robert Sandelman.
With consumer confidence and employment at historically high levels, American consumers appear to be celebrating, Sandelman says. “When people feel happy about themselves and their work, they tend to indulge. They want to treat themselves to the best.”
Some nutritionists say dieters who have been eating low-fat snacks and frozen dinners for almost a decade on the advice of diet gurus without getting leaner are fed up and returning to foods with richer taste and texture.
“They’re going back to a more balanced diet and getting away from being so phobic about fat,” said Ann Grandjean, director of the Center for Human Nutrition in Omaha.
Grandjean suggests that many stressed-out people may be living in the moment, indulging today with the expectation that new fat substitutes and fat-blocking prescription drugs such as Xenical will help them keep their weight under control.
Americans are either tired of experts telling them what’s good or bad for them, or they’re just too tired to care.
Annual U.S. consumption of low-fat and fat-free snacks peaked in 1997 at 22.6 servings per person and declined to 19.7 servings in 1998, the latest year for which statistics are available, according to NPD Group, a Rosemont, Ill.-based research group.
Although doughnut chains such as Krispy Kreme and Winchell’s are racing to open new stores, the big bagel chains are shuttering locations, merging with other chains or trying to make themselves over as sandwich shops. To cater to America’s sweet tooth, many also are adding muffins, scones and other goodies.
“We’re trying to broaden our appeal,” said Robert Hartnett, Noah/Einstein’s chief executive and a former franchisee. “We fit into a category now that I’d call fast casual. We satisfy a variety of needs.”
Since Noah/Einstein began adding sweets and lunch items last year, breakfast bagel sales have shrunk to just 40% of the chain’s business, and it is continuing to add items to its menus.
Noah/Einstein’s overall sales rose 1% to $375.5 million in 1999. Its net loss narrowed to $14.4 million from $203.9 million the previous year as the company focused on cost-cutting and streamlining operations.
But its cash flow is not sufficient to satisfy the company’s $125 million in bond debt, racked up during its peak expansion years of 1995 to 1997, which will mature this fall.
The company opened more than 200 stores in 1997, a staggering amount for any chain. Hartnett concedes that not all of those new locations were good ones.
The company is now trying to persuade its minority investors or its bondholders to trade that debt for a large stake in the company.
Eatontown, N.J.-based New World Coffee-Manhattan Bagel Inc., the country’s No. 2 bagel chain, also is reportedly interested in acquiring the company.
New World CEO Ramin Kamfar would not confirm or deny those reports.
Noah/Einstein’s crushing debt load and its sluggish sales have pushed the company’s stock price down 76% in the last year. It was delisted from the Nasdaq Stock Market on March 7.
Kamfar also has been trying to reinvent his Manhattan Bagel chain as more of a sandwich place after scooping it up out of bankruptcy in 1998. Besides bagels, the company now offers wrap-style sandwiches and gourmet coffee from its chain of specialty coffee shops.
“Coffee is definitely an important element,” Kamfar said.
Analysts say the biggest blow to the bagel chains hasn’t come from supermarkets or doughnut shops but from America’s fast-growing java joints, which have been expanding their food offerings.
“People are saying, ‘Give me the convenience that I want and the coffee that I want,’ ” restaurant consultant Sandelman said. “They think, ‘A bagel is a bagel. How much different is it going to be if I get it from Starbucks or Noah’s?’ ”
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Dollars to Doughnuts
Industry experts say customers are moving away from bagels and back to more decadent foods, including doughnuts, as people become less obsessed with counting grams of fat.
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Sources: Noah’s, Krispy Kreme,
The Complete Book of Food Counts
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3a672d3d562eacc18d97fb6609041ed2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-02-mn-25766-story.html | Actors Strike Over Fee System for Commercials | Actors Strike Over Fee System for Commercials
The actors who pitch everything from soap to soft drinks on television and radio, often seen as the less glamorous members of the entertainment industry, went on strike Monday against the advertising industry.
The strike by members of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the first work stoppage in Hollywood in 12 years, is not expected to be settled easily or quickly. It may signal further Hollywood labor unrest.
At the heart of the strike is a desire by actors to end the flat-fee system for ads that air on cable television. The union is seeking payments for the actors whenever an ad airs on cable, just as they are paid residuals whenever a network commercial runs. The actors also want to address the fledging issue of how they will be paid when ads run on the Internet.
Ad industry negotiators counter that the splintering of TV audiences that has occurred with the proliferation of new channels means ads have to run more often to reach the same number of people, even on the major networks. So the old formula is unworkable, they argue, and instead they want actors to accept a flat fee for their work.
SAG estimates that 40,000 of its 97,000 members have appeared in commercials, earning a total of about $600 million annually.
Although some celebrities and sports stars enjoy lucrative endorsement contracts--actress Lindsay Wagner, for example, receives $600,000 to $700,000 as the spokeswoman for Southern California Ford dealers--the union argues that the vast majority of commercial actors barely make a living, or have to hold down other jobs to make ends meet.
Actor Gary Epp, who has appeared in commercials for such products as Thomas English Muffins and Motrin, said he makes between $5,000 and $8,000 per commercial, depending on how often the spots air.
“In a good year, I get four or five commercials, which is more than the average actor does. It probably pays more to make the French fries at McDonald’s than it does to make the McDonald’s commercials,” he said.
Late Monday, actors scored their first victory when they got a Nike commercial featuring golfer Tiger Woods--a SAG member--postponed indefinitely. Actors had threatened to picket the Florida country club where the commercial was to have been filmed.
Actors marked the start of the strike Monday with marches in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and San Francisco. In Los Angeles, about 1,000 people--including such well-known actors as Elliott Gould and Richard Crenna--marched down Wilshire Boulevard, chanting “Hey, hey, ho ho, corporate greed has got to go,” stopping along the way to picket outside various advertising agency offices.
“This industry is called show business, and it’s time advertisers learned how little business they can generate when SAG and AFTRA members don’t show up for work,” said SAG President William Daniels.
The two sides last met April 14. A federal mediator failed to resolve the disagreements.
“There is a huge gulf here,” said Century City lawyer Richard E. Posell, who represents ad production companies. He predicts a strike of at least two months. “I have a client who decided to get his knee surgery out of the way now.”
Despite the strike, Ira Shepard, labor counsel for the committee that is representing two ad industry associations--the Assn. of National Advertisers and the American Assn. of Advertising Agencies--said commercials will continue to be produced with nonunion talent or union members who cross the picket lines. “From our vantage point, we’re continuing to produce commercials using whatever talent will work,” Shepard said.
The last entertainment industry labor action was in 1988, when actors went on strike for about three weeks. That was the same year of Hollywood’s most devastating strike to date, an action by the Writers Guild of America that nearly destroyed the television season that year and cost the industry an estimated $500 million.
While Monday’s action is limited to actors working in commercials, it is a sign of more labor troubles ahead for Hollywood.
There is a growing discontent among the entertainment industry’s rank and file workers, who say they are being denied their share of the riches that have come with the explosion in the entertainment business. Specifically, they want a bigger piece of the profits in cable television, Spanish-language channels and other growing TV markets.
These same issues will be front and center next year when studios and networks negotiate new contracts with actors and writers.
He argues that the ad industry’s latest offer is generous. Under it, he said, an actor in a commercial would make a flat payment of $2,575 if a commercial aired at least once on a network, and an additional $1,627 if it aired once on cable.
“You name me an industry where the scale is $4,200 for one day’s work,” Shepard said. “And it isn’t even that rigorous.”
But actors counter that such numbers are misleading. Stretched over the life of the commercial, they argue, the amounts come to a few dollars a day. The statistics, they say, also don’t take into account that actors get few commercial opportunities and have to pick up other costs themselves, from paying agents to having their own publicity photos taken.
“People think that we make crazy amounts of money. The problem is that for every hundred auditions you do, you get one job,” said Giselle Loren, who has recently appeared in English- and Spanish-language ads for Foster Farms, Ralston Purina and BP Amoco.
SAG Offers Agencies Temporary Waivers
As only the shooting of new commercials is affected, the impact won’t be felt for a while because any completed ads can be run. In addition, many commercials were put on a fast track in anticipation of the strike.
Still, SAG immediately started asking actors and sports stars who are SAG members to scuttle their commercials this week unless the ad agencies and companies agree to pay according to SAG’s latest proposal.
SAG officials said that the SAG members can still act in commercials and remain in good standing if the ad agency agrees.
“All we’re saying is that during the strike, while we are at loggerheads here, all the advertising agencies have to do is sign an interim agreement,” said actor and SAG activist Gould.
Shepard said that none of the 300 agencies and 150 large advertisers he represents has broken rank yet and signed a temporary waiver with SAG.
One possibility for circumventing the strike is to shoot commercials overseas, but SAG has been lining up support from unions in Canada and Europe, hoping to prevent ad productions from moving there.
Most affected will be companies trying to launch a new product or campaign because they won’t have access to 135,000 SAG and AFTRA members affected by the negotiations unless the members cross the picket lines.
“You could be dead in the water if you have a new product. All of a sudden you have a product on the shelf, but don’t have any new spots to pitch it,” said Ashley Postelwaite, executive producer at Renegade Animation, which makes commercials for Cheetos snacks, among other things.
Also hurt could be the Hollywood economy. Commercial production grew into an increasingly important part of the economy during the 1990s. One of five permits issued to shoot in the streets of Los Angeles County are for commercial productions.
“Not making commercials and people not getting their paychecks will make a dent if it’s a long strike. We don’t have a dollar number for the industry, but we know in a localized sense it’s important,” said Rajeev Dhawan, director of the UCLA Anderson School’s economic forecasting project.
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62afdabf33b6959e633d839fcead99a1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-03-mn-25998-story.html | U.S. Lags in Toxicity Data, Report Says | U.S. Lags in Toxicity Data, Report Says
The nation’s health experts are unable to gauge the effect of many potentially toxic chemicals on humans because the federal government has failed to study such exposure and has “a long way to go” before remedying the situation, according to a report released Tuesday by the research arm of Congress.
The study by the General Accounting Office was begun nearly two years ago at the request of Democratic Reps. Henry A. Waxman and Maxine Waters, both of Los Angeles, Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and other members of Congress. Pelosi announced the findings Tuesday at a House subcommittee hearing on children and environmental health.
The study concluded that the Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency should “develop a coordinated federal strategy for short- and long-term monitoring and reporting of human exposures to potentially toxic chemicals.”
“Millions of Americans work and live in environments full of dangerous contaminants,” Pelosi said. “We must make a commitment to do the research and gather the data that will help us understand the effect of chemicals on human health.”
The study reviewed more than 1,400 chemicals that pose potential threats to human health and found that only 6% are being tracked by HHS and the EPA. And only a small percentage of the chemicals known or thought to be carcinogenic are being tracked by the government, the study found.
In some situations where medical experts wanted to collect “human exposure” data--from blood, hair or urine, for example--and examine it for chemicals, they were constrained by financial resources, the study found. Such situations included suspected “cancer clusters” or contact with toxic chemicals. State and federal environmental health officials said that current budgets allow them to collect or use such data in less than half the cases where they thought it to be necessary.
Even when laboratories have the capacity to collect the data, no laboratory method has been developed for assessing exposure levels in human tissue for many of the 1,400 chemicals known to pose a threat to human health, the report said.
Public health officials said that, to put local data into context, they need more information on typical exposures in the general population.
“The release of the GAO study today sends a serious and direct message to Congress that we must do more to protect our communities,” Pelosi said. “We must provide the resources that will enable federal and state officials to address these barriers.”
Breast cancer will be diagnosed in about 180,000 women this year, and prostate cancer will be diagnosed in about the same number of men, according to the American Cancer Society. Some medical researchers suspect environmental factors have contributed to the high numbers.
“There are increasing concerns about cancer rates being linked to environmental exposures,” said Katherine Iritani, the lead evaluator for the GAO study.
Data on how environmental toxins affect children are particularly lacking, according to physicians and public health officials who testified at Tuesday’s hearing before the labor, health and human services and education subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee. “Children have been data orphans,” said Dr. Richard Jackson, director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Data do exist in some areas--infant mortality, for example, is at a record low. Cases of lead poisoning among children are on the decline, Jackson said, and the CDC hopes to eradicate them completely by 2010.
However, childhood asthma is on the increase. In the last two decades, the number of asthmatic children has doubled to about 4 million, and officials are unsure why the number of cases is on the rise.
In addition, only 10 states have a surveillance system in place to monitor birth defects, Jackson said, and data on autistic children are only being collected in the city of Atlanta. He said that the cost of establishing surveillance systems to monitor childhood illnesses could reach an estimated $500,000 per state.
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2a6536e191010b48c1c90433f9d96402 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-09-me-28147-story.html | Northridge Opens Central American Studies Program | Northridge Opens Central American Studies Program
The birthplace of two of the nation’s first ethnic studies departments is now home to the first Central American studies minor, Cal State Northridge officials announced Monday.
The program will focus on the half-million Guatemalan, Salvadoran, Honduran and other Central American immigrants in Southern California, a number projected to reach more than 2.5 million by 2010.
“Cal State Northridge is the de facto intellectual center of Central Americans and Central American studies in the United States,” said Roberto Lovato, the program’s coordinator.
Lovato, a Salvadoran immigrant who is president of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, said the program will focus on the effects of globalization on Central Americans, many of whom frequently shuttle between nations, cultures and languages. The minor, which requires 18 units of course work, will explore the legacy of Central American wars and government oppression over the past century.
Two of the first Chicano and African American studies departments in the United States were established at Cal State Northridge in the late 1960s.
Cal State Northridge is home to 1,200 students of Central American descent, more than at any other American university, Lovato said.
Interim President Louanne Kennedy said members of the Central American United Student Assn. approached her with the idea in 1993, but a year later the Northridge earthquake derailed those discussions.
Students suggested the minor again in 1997, this time to College of Humanities Dean Jorge Garcia, who enlisted the support of other professors and campus administrators.
Siris Badios, a member of the Central American United Students Assn., was one of the students who renewed the push for the program in 1997. She is pursuing a minor in the new program. “I wanted to go to college in a place to help me understand what had happened in El Salvador,” said Badios, 20.
Until this year, when she started taking Central American studies courses, Badios said she knew little about the history of her country. Her parents, traumatized by their experiences during El Salvador’s civil war, barely speak of their lives there, Badios said.
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ccb32651d8bd976956fd588b65da0b53 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-12-ca-29107-story.html | A Case of Saturn Night Fever? | A Case of Saturn Night Fever?
“Battlefield Earth” is set in the year 3000, but stuck in the 1970s--and not in any hip, retro way.
As taken from L. Ron Hubbard’s 1982 novel, in the year 2000 aliens called the Psychlos conquered Earth. The Psychlos are a species/corporation whose guiding moral principle is profitability. By 3000, the only humans left are slaves or Neanderthals hiding in the hills. Both groups have the intellect of baboons, but that doesn’t prevent them from staging a revolution with perfectly preserved 1,000-year-old American military weapons.
Sure, science fiction gets some leeway in the reality department, but “Battlefield Earth” doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. Compounded by a dated visual style, patched-together special effects and ludicrous dialogue, “Battlefield Earth” is a wholly miserable experience.
At ground zero of this disaster sits John Travolta, producer and star. (Travolta is a longtime follower of the Church of Scientology, which Hubbard founded, and was instrumental in getting the film made.) He plays Terl, the Psychlos’ chief of security who thinks he’s above his station. “Groomed from birth to conquer galaxies” is how he describes himself.
He looks like he hasn’t been groomed, period. His head is covered with this falling-apart dreadlocked beehive hairdo. He’s stumbling around in platform boots that are supposed to make him appear 7 feet tall, but instead just make him clumsy. (At least when he was in platforms before, in the disco classic “Saturday Night Fever,” he moved better.)
Travolta’s played pure-evil villains before, notably in John Woo’s “Face/Off.” But there’s something new--a campy, fey style--to his turn as Terl. Is that a bit of Bette Davis as he cackles, “As a friend, I could forget to file the report. But unfortunately I’m not your friend!”? His dialogue throughout is punctuated with a wicked laugh that recalls Vincent Price--but again, more campy than eerie.
It’s an embarrassing performance that begs the question, “What was he thinking?” But that at least gives the audience something to ponder while this scenario--it can hardly be called a plot--rumbles on.
Barry Pepper plays Jonnie, a restless young human captured by the Psychlos and used for experiments by Terl. In a nonsensical development, Terl decides to mine gold in an area too radioactive for Psychlo health. So he tries to smarten up one of these man-animals to see if he can learn to operate mining equipment.
Jonnie gets strapped into a learning machine and knowledge--from world history to Euclidean geometry--gets pumped into his brain. The Psychlos apparently don’t believe in doling out information on a need-to-know basis. Pepper’s performance alternates between a startled expression and a snarl. The most intriguing thing about him is his hairdo; apparently even in the primitive cave-man-like world he inhabited, there was time for braiding. Forest Whitaker is the only recognizable face, though in his Psychlo get-up he resembles Burt Lahr’s cowardly lion.
The script by Corey Mandell and J.D. Shapiro may be laughable, but the film itself is grim. It’s not just the violence--much of which remains distractingly off-screen--but the whole tenor of the movie. When Terl starts shooting the legs off cows, science fiction hits a new low.
Director Roger Christian got his start as a set decorator on “Star Wars” and has--though it’s hard to believe--made films before (“Underworld” and “Masterminds”). His sole visual device is framing shots at a 15-degree angle. Maybe that’s so no one will notice how unbalanced the Psychlos are in those ridiculous boots.
The aesthetic in “Battlefield Earth” seems deliberately 1970s sci-fi. (Why someone would choose that is another question.) Cuts between scenes are done with wipes across the screen. The weapons could be leftovers from the “Star Trek” TV series. Christian makes some lines of dialogue resonate--literally--with echoes.
The visual effects come from nine production houses, and the patchwork shows. Some of the computer-generated imagery looks fine, but others--the Psychlos’ home planet, for one--would be comical on “Star Trek: Voyager.” The ruins of American cities have a distinct “Logan’s Run” quality to them. But it’s the non-computer stuff that’s really bad. Shots don’t match. The climactic battle of “Battlefield Earth” is nothing but a loud chaotic assault on the audience.
This film aspires to the simple rah-rah good vs. evil frenzy that fueled blockbusters from “Star Wars” to “Independence Day,” but it doesn’t come anywhere close. In the post-apocalyptic adventure genre, “Battlefield Earth” makes “Waterworld” look like a masterpiece.
Swaggering about in his platforms and padded leather outfit, Travolta (and much of the movie) is almost over-the-top enough to be bad in a good way. But it’s too lame even for that. Maybe he needed higher platforms.
* MPAA rating: PG-13 for intense sci-fi action. Times guidelines: many explosions and extended battle sequences. Nearly all violence is bloodless and takes place off-screen. Humans enslaved and kept in cages.
‘Battlefield Earth’
John Travolta: Terl
Barry Pepper: Jonnie
Forest Whitaker: Ker
Morgan Creek and Franchise Pictures present a Franchise Pictures/Jonathan D. Krane/JTP Films production. Directed by Roger Christian. Screenplay by Corey Mandell and J.D. Shapiro based on the novel by L. Ron Hubbard. Produced by Elie Samaha, Jonathan D. Krane and John Travolta. Executive producers Andrew Stevens, Ashok Amritraj and Don Carmody. Director of photography Giles Nuttgens. Production and costume design Patrick Tatopoulos. Edited by Robin Russell. Music by Elia Cmiral. Visual effects supervisor Erik Henry. Casting by Lynn Stalmaster. Co-producers Tracee Stanley and James Holt. Running time: 1 hour, 57 minutes.
In general release.
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5845e4d1c9060b6ad4779b39d9e328a0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-12-mn-29246-story.html | Quackenbush Secretly Routed Funds to TV Ads | Quackenbush Secretly Routed Funds to TV Ads
Even before they set up controversial earthquake foundations, Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush and his aides created a system to secretly use $1.9 million in public money to pay for television spots featuring the Republican official.
Over the course of a year, documents obtained by The Times show, money from state settlements with several insurance companies was funneled to private political consultants and production studios through a system devised to operate outside of normal state controls and avoid the scrutiny of the Legislature and other government agencies.
Some of the money was paid by insurance companies directly to businesses and consultants under the terms of agreements with Quackenbush, which required them to pay “vendors” designated by department officials.
“We have a need to not receive the funds directly, but have the company hold the money and pay out to three parties at our direction,” Patricia Staggs, one of the department’s top lawyers, wrote in a November 1997 internal e-mail obtained by The Times.
Other money was channeled to a private fund, named the Insurance Education Fund, that the department established in Marin County with a fund manager who spent it according to directives faxed by department officials.
Among the businesses getting payments were Target Enterprises, an Encino-based media buyer used by Quackenbush to purchase air time during his reelection campaign, and Chetwood Productions, a business owned by a college friend of William Palmer, who was then the department’s chief counsel.
A few months later, Palmer reported that Timothy McNeal, owner of Chetwood, had loaned him $4,000 to help make a down payment on a new home.
Most of the settlement funds were used to pay for a television ad campaign in December 1997 and again in August 1998, featuring Quackenbush telling viewers of the work done by his department to protect consumers.
A spokesman for Quackenbush said an attorney for the commissioner had advised him that each of the settlements was legal under California law.
Lawmakers who on Thursday were advised of the agreements and the expenditures for television spots said it appeared the commissioner had abused his authority.
“These latest revelations show a pattern of behavior on the part of Commissioner Quackenbush of diverting money for his own political use that should have gone to taxpayers or to victims of the insurance companies,” said Assembly Insurance Committee Chairman Jack Scott (D-Altadena).
The assemblyman said at a recent committee hearing that Quackenbush often claimed ignorance when asked to explain actions by his department.
“Now it looks like he either knew what was happening, or as the insurance commissioner, surely should have known,” Scott said. “If these reports are accurate, then his misconduct in office is outrageous.”
Nothing Illegal, Says Quackenbush Staffer
Although Scott declined to comment further, “misconduct in office” is the standard used to impeach state officials. Article 4, Section 18 of the California Constitution says: “State officers elected on a statewide basis . . . are subject to impeachment for misconduct in office.”
Quackenbush appeared before Scott’s committee last month to answer questions about foundations he created with $12.8 million collected from six insurance companies as penalties for their handling of Northridge earthquake claims. The foundations have been under investigation by state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, who oversees charitable trusts.
Last week, Lockyer moved to freeze the assets of one of the foundations, the California Research and Assistance Fund, arguing that it was a “sham” operation whose assets had been diverted to friends and acquaintances of a key aide to Quackenbush. Lockyer also questioned the expenditure of $3 million for public service television spots featuring the commissioner, which aired in the fall of 1999.
Deputy Insurance Commissioner Dan Edwards, a spokesman for Quackenbush, said the commissioner has been told by his lawyers that there was nothing illegal in the way he handled settlement funds, either through the foundations or through agreements he made in 1997 and 1998.
“The commissioner had been advised by staff counsel that the agreements in the various settlements were within the settlement authority available to him and to other regulators in the state,” Edwards said.
The decision to use some of the money for television spots, he said, was an attempt to alert consumers that they might be eligible for restitution if they had been victimized by insurance companies.
Aired as Quackenbush was preparing to run for reelection and his wife, Chris Quackenbush, was gearing up for a campaign for the state Senate, the first ad featured the commissioner on screen for nearly the entire 30 seconds of the spot.
“I’m California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush,” he said. “Billions of dollars are available to be returned to California consumers. This money is there because my department vigorously enforced consumer protection laws.”
Newspaper reports at the time said the spots prompted a surge of calls to insurance companies from policyholders demanding money they were owed. But department officials conceded that the “billions” referred mostly to funds held by the Insurance Department from 86 companies that had been liquidated. They acknowledged that in 84 of those “open estates,” the deadline for making claims had already expired.
At the height of his campaign, in August 1998, another spot featuring Quackenbush aired throughout the state. In that one, he urged consumers to call a hotline if they were having trouble with their insurance companies.
State Sen. Liz Figueroa (D-Fremont) said those spots struck her as so political in nature that she proposed legislation to prevent insurance commissioners from using settlement money to finance advertisements that featured them. The bill died in a legislative committee.
“It was his name, his face all over the ad and we thought it was very inappropriate,” she said, “for that to be on the air at the same time he was running for reelection and his wife coincidentally was running for the Senate. It not only highlighted his name but the Quackenbush name.”
Spending Arranged to Elude Outside Scrutiny
The nearly $2-million advertising campaign was paid for with money from several insurance companies and businesses targeted by the department for enforcement actions.
Internal e-mails and contracts show that the agreements were structured under Palmer’s direction to give the department direct control over expenditures and to ensure that there would be no outside scrutiny from other government agencies.
“I’ve heard that we have about $1.3 million allotted for consumer outreach efforts outside of the state budget,” the department’s finance officer e-mailed Palmer in 1997.
Normally expenditures by government agencies are scrutinized by the Legislature through the state budget, and their contracts with outside business by the California Department of General Services.
An agreement with Levitz Furniture and General Electric Capital Corp. in August 1997 to settle a complaint related to credit insurance required that a $675,000 payment be made to the Insurance Education Fund. Internal documents show that the money was to be held by Gilardi & Co., a fund manager in Larkspur, Calif.
Other documents show that department lawyers periodically faxed directions to Gilardi “to fund the airing of the previously produced television spots.”
Two months later, an agreement was reached with John Hancock Mutual Life requiring a payment of $550,000 “directly to vendors selected by the commissioner for mass media outreach communication, which shall include radio, newspaper, mailings and television.”
The agreement specified that the television spots it financed could not “mention by name” or otherwise refer to Hancock.
Department officials said Hancock was ultimately required to make payments directly to Target Enterprises, a media buyer that purchased television time on stations throughout the state. From the ad campaigns, Target was paid a small percentage--$138,000--for placing the spots. Another $50,000 was paid to Chetwood Productions for producing them.
Another agreement with Dayton Hudson Corp. a year later required that company to pay $42,500 for “consumer outreach.” Department records showed the company was ultimately required to make the payment directly to Target Enterprises.
Tony Miller, a lawyer and former acting secretary of state, said he filed a complaint with the Fair Political Practices Commission in 1997 contending that the settlement payments were really campaign contributions that benefited the commissioner. The FPPC rejected the complaint.
“Quackenbush was positioning himself and he was using this money to enhance his political prospects as he faced a tough election,” Miller said. “I still believe that technically speaking these were campaign contributions because they went to an entity controlled by an elected official which was structured to be outside state control.”
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Financing for TV Ads
Using money obtained from Department of Insurance settlements with private companies, Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush financed “consumer outreach” television spots that aired as he was facing reelection. According to department records, money from the settlements was diverted to skirt the state accounting and budgeting process.
Where Some Settlement Money Went
* John Hancock Mutual Life settled Oct. 28, 1997, for $550,000, paid to Target Enterprises
* Levitz Furniture and General Electric Capital Corp., which sells credit insurance, settled Aug. 19, 1997, for $675,000, paid to Insurance Education Fund
* Dayton Hudson and Mervyn’s, which sells credit insurance, settled Aug. 25, 1998, for $42,500, paid to Target Enterprises
*
Quackenbush in a public service advertisement that aired in December 1997.
$1.2 million for ad
*
Quackenbush in a public service advertisement that aired in August 1998.
$732,000 for ad
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5e32e931c41d8d03d2cbf320b46162de | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-13-sp-29668-story.html | Mercker’s Condition Stabilizes | Mercker’s Condition Stabilizes
Angel pitcher Kent Mercker went from what seemed like a severe headache to a potentially life-threatening condition late Thursday night, when a hemorrhage was discovered on the surface of his brain.
Mercker, 32, was placed in intensive care at UCI Medical Center in Orange, where a CT scan and an arteriogram indicated bleeding between his brain and his skull.
Dr. John Kusske, chair of neurological surgery at UCI Medical Center, said the cause and origin of the bleeding hasn’t been determined, but Angel physician Lewis Yocum said the bleeding stopped by Friday. Mercker was in stable condition and was expected to remain in intensive care through the weekend.
Yocum said it’s possible that Mercker, who was placed on the 15-day disabled list Friday night, could need brain surgery.
“Any time there’s bleeding around the brain, it’s a very serious situation,” Yocum said. “There are potentially some serious problems.”
Mercker’s problems began in the second inning of Thursday night’s game against the Texas Rangers, when he doubled over and placed his hands on his knees, as if to catch his breath, after a strikeout.
Four pitches later, he was hunched over again, complaining of a headache and dizziness, and was pulled from the game. After examining Mercker in the clubhouse, Yocum and Angel athletictrainer Ned Bergert agreed that he should be sent to a hospital for further evaluation.
“We saw things that were not typical of a mild headache,” Yocum said. “With the severity of the headache, we did not feel comfortable trying to treat it at the park.”
The three most common causes of a brain hemorrhage, according to doctors, are an aneurysm, malformed blood vessels or trauma. Trauma has been ruled out in Mercker’s case, but among the other possible causes are hypertension, dehydration or a tumor. All are being investigated.
Both Yocum and General Manager Bill Stoneman, who visited Mercker along with Angel pitcher Kent Bottenfield on Friday night, said Mercker had not brought any previous symptoms to their attention.
“He was sleeping, and when we walked in, he woke up and recognized us immediately,” Stoneman said of their five-minute visit. “He smiled, he appeared relaxed, calm, very stable. There were a lot of gadgets attached to him, but other than that, he looked very good.”
The same could not be said of Mercker’s teammates, who were somewhat in shock. Already reeling from the loss of pitcher Ken Hill and shortstop Gary DiSarcina to injuries this week, they were stunned by news of Mercker.
“It’s like a numbing feeling,” catcher Matt Walbeck said amid a somber clubhouse before Friday night’s 13-11 loss to the Rangers at Edison Field. “It’s more of a reality check. Just because we’re all big and bad on the baseball field doesn’t mean we’re not human. It’s a shock. It shakes you up a bit.”
A few players who remained in the clubhouse long after Thursday night’s game were aware that Mercker’s condition had worsened, but many Angels didn’t hear the news until they arrived at the park Friday.
Angel first baseman Mo Vaughn was too distraught to speak to reporters before the game. Left fielder Darin Erstad was at a loss for words. “I really don’t know what to say,” he said. Manager Mike Scioscia said Mercker’s condition made a baseball game seem trivial.
“Baseball is not your first priority when something like this happens,” Angel reliever Mark Petkovsek said. “It’s difficult, because I know Julie [Mercker’s wife] and his two kids, and you realize what he is to that family. He’s a dad, a husband, not just a baseball player.”
DiSarcina has a serious medical condition of his own. He will travel to Chicago on Monday to undergo an angiogram, which will examine the blood vessels in his sore neck and right shoulder, and visit with James Yao, a vascular surgeon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
But his thoughts were also on Mercker, a veteran left-hander who was excited about joining the Angel rotation last weekend after spending the first five weeks of the season in the bullpen.
“It’s unbelievable,” said DiSarcina, who has witnessed more than his share of tragedy and bizarre injuries in his nine years with the Angels. “It’s definitely serious. You’re talking about his brain. That’s not a pulled hamstring or anything.”
Ironically, Mercker said in an interview Wednesday that he felt somewhat guilty about gaining a spot in the rotation because of injuries to pitchers Ken Hill and Jason Dickson and Ramon Ortiz’s demotion to triple-A Edmonton.
“I’ve always contended if getting into the rotation means guys getting hurt or pitching poorly, I didn’t want it,” said Mercker, who was unhappy about being assigned to the bullpen to start the season. “I guess someone else’s misfortunes are my fortunes.”
Until Thursday night.
“This is real life, real world,” Scioscia said. “It’s very sobering. It seems like he’s stabilized. The bleeding has stopped, but what caused it? The short-term news is good, but this is a very scary condition.”
So is DiSarcina’s condition--not because it’s life-threatening but because it could threaten his season. Numerous tests have proven inconclusive, but it appears the tightness in his right shoulder might be circulatory in nature, so the Angels have decided to send him to a vascular expert.
“They’re trying to do every test, on the nerves, blood vessels, muscles, bones, just so they don’t jump to any conclusions,” said DiSarcina, who was placed on the 15-day disabled list Monday. “Then, at the end, it’s like putting together a puzzle. We’ll sit down and say, how do we attack this?
“Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s tendinitis. But something is not allowing me to throw the ball across the field, and it’s not something that’s going to be cured by 10 days of rest.”
*
TEXAS 13
ANGELS 11
Royce Clayton hits grand slam for Rangers. Page 5
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9083c586310d479d5bd5f049f07225d9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-14-ca-29786-story.html | A Remarkable Alliance of Form | A Remarkable Alliance of Form
A 50-year survey of ceramics by Otto and Gertrud Natzler is more than an opportunity to admire impossibly beautiful pottery. It’s a chance to remember the lives and the accomplishments of the Los Angeles-based couple who became world-famous for marrying elegantly simple clay forms with spectacular glazes. And no one knows the story better than Otto Natzler, who lost his wife 29 years ago but is still going strong.
“How many other 92-year-olds have you interviewed?” he asked, strolling into Couturier Gallery on La Brea Avenue. His easy gait, bright eyes, quick wit and near-perfect recall make it difficult to believe that he’s a day over 70, but he can account for that. Taking a hike every morning, followed by an hour and a half of yoga--during which he stands on his head--keeps him fit and remarkably young. Even as he frets about lapses in his short-term memory and the failing eyes and fingers that have prevented him from working for the past couple of years, he tells one anecdote after another, detailing the evolution of a remarkable artistic partnership.
One favorite story takes him back to 1939, a year after the Nazis annexed Austria and the newlywed Natzlers fled Vienna for Los Angeles, with the help of a cousin who had emigrated from Germany and settled here. Otto and Gertrud could only take $12 apiece out of Austria, and they each spent $1 of that when their ship docked in Guatemala. “We couldn’t resist buying a snakeskin belt and a crocodile belt,” Natzler said.
They were allowed to bring Gertrud’s pottery wheel, a small electric kiln and some furniture to America, but their early days in Los Angeles were a struggle. The Natzlers had achieved early success in Europe and even won a silver medal at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris, but they were starting over here. Finding commercial outlets for their pottery was a slow process, so they accepted a few students to provide them with a steady--if decidedly meager--income, Natzler said.
At the insistence of one of their students, they sent five of their pieces to a prestigious competitive national exhibition at the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts in New York (now the Everson Museum of Fine Arts). “We had to pay a $3 entry fee and shipping charges. We couldn’t afford that and we thought the pieces would be broken, so we didn’t want to do it. But this student said we had to, so we did--and then forgot all about it,” Natzler said.
“Then one day in November of 1939, when we were both at work, the doorbell rang. It was Western Union, delivering a telegram. We still had parents in Vienna, so our hearts stopped beating. We didn’t want to open the telegram.”
*
The opening word, “Congratulations,” was a huge relief and the message was “the greatest surprise,” he said. They had won a $100 purchase prize from the museum, which would add their work to its collection. “It was a fortune at the time,” Natzler said. “It would be worth $1,000 today.” Actually, a bit more than that: $1,230.22.
America was indeed “the promised land,” he said. And the artists’ arrival did not go unnoticed for long. They gained increasing appreciation for their work even as they took classes in English at a local high school and studied American history in preparation for citizenship examinations, which they passed in 1944.
On March 10, 1939, nine months before the telegram from Syracuse arrived, The Times published a front-page article with five photographs of the Natzlers, announcing “Artist-potters busy here after flight from Vienna.”
“We had rented half a house at 1835 St. Andrews Place,” Natzler recalled. “At 7:15 in the morning the day that article came out, our landlord knocked on the door and said, ‘If you had committed murder, you wouldn’t have had more publicity.’ ”
*
The Natzlers became known as a team, but it was Gertrud who introduced Otto to ceramics. They met in 1933, after he had lost his job as a textile designer and she was working as a secretary but learning to use a potter’s wheel. As Otto tells the story--in an autobiographical essay in the catalog of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 1968 exhibition of Natzler ceramics--he was far more interested in Gertrud than in ceramics. But he accompanied her to a ceramics class and began making clay sculpture.
Essentially self-taught, they soon began working on their own, with Gertrud at the wheel and Otto at the kiln. She perfected her extraordinary talent for throwing paper-thin pots while he pursued his interest in chemistry by experimenting with glazes and developing more than 2,000 formulas for a wide variety of surface effects ranging from iridescent lusters to crystalline patterns to bubbly eruptions.
In the foreword of the LACMA catalog, then-museum director Kenneth Donahue praised the Natzlers’ “subtle but infinite variety of simple, unaffected shapes and surfaces” and said their works “seemed to have been born and to have grown as if they were natural things.” He likened Gertrud to “a musical virtuoso who lets the form flow intuitively from her fingers” as she created “timeless” shapes of “refined, natural simplicity.” As for Otto, Donahue said he created “the perfect complement” by developing “glazes as fine as insect wings and rough as cratered lava” during many years of experimentation.
By that time, the Natzlers had compiled an impressive exhibition record. The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago had shown their work. Inevitably featured in national surveys, their ceramics also were selected by the Smithsonian Institution for an American exhibition in Prague in 1962.
Gertrud’s death in 1971--shortly before a retrospective exhibition at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco--was devastating to Otto. “I lost my wife, my lover, my right hand at the life we were living,” Natzler said.
Fortunately, the previous year he and Gertrud had met Gail Reynolds, a teacher who made sculpture in her free time and was attracted to the Natzlers’ ceramics. “I thought I was finished, but Gail said, ‘Your work isn’t done yet,’ ” Natzler said. She persuaded him to glaze pieces Gertrud had made in a productive period the year before her death. In 1973, Natzler and Reynolds were married. Since then, he has developed his own body of hand-built, architectonic ceramics.
The Couturier Gallery exhibition will include about 40 works, dating from the 1940s to the ‘90s. Natzler is looking forward to the show, but--in a sense--it will be like all the others.
“It’s always the same,” he said. “I look at these things and think, ‘How did we ever make them?’ We tried to do the work that we felt was the essence of ceramics--thrown pots in the purest abstract form with a glaze that works organically. But they are partly man-made and partly due to good luck and God’s will.”
*
“GERTRUD AND OTTO NATZLER: A 50 YEAR SURVEY,” Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave. Dates: Friday to July 1. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Phone: (310) 933-5557.
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fe838affe757c9ae2478ce917bce9fef | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-18-me-31412-story.html | Imitation Instinct Is More Basic Than Just Flattery | Imitation Instinct Is More Basic Than Just Flattery
Simon says: Walk my walk.
Simon says: Talk my talk.
Simon says: Imitate.
Such copycat games of follow the leader, dependent on matching the actions of others, are the stuff of childhood afternoons and nursery school play.
Now, research also reveals that they are incorporated into the bedrock of the brain itself as an important natural tool for development and learning. Indeed, at the core of what it means to be human is a powerful instinct for imitation that dwarfs the aping abilities of other primates.
In its very cells and synapses, the brain is built to imitate, an international team of researchers has discovered.
Using a powerful medical imaging device to study the mind at work, UCLA neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni at the university’s brain mapping division, working with colleagues in Italy and Germany, recently identified special areas of the brain involved in the act of imitation. To catch the copycat brain in the act, they took unique functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI), which capture the high-speed ebb and flow of enriched blood to active neural circuits.
They found that two areas of the brain appear to respond when we watch someone perform an action and when we perform the same action ourselves. The active neural circuits reveal the essence of mimicry.
Their work shows for the first time the neural anatomy of a crucial technique for picking up important motor, communication and social skills, several experts said.
“These findings are part of a revolutionary new understanding that thought and action are inseparable,” said psychologist and computer theorist Michael Arbib, director of the USC Brain Project. They “provide a bridge from thought and action to the crucial role of imitation in our social behavior.”
Imitation Is a Strong Instinct
So often, when we find ourselves on unfamiliar ground--from trying to master new dance steps or deciding which fork to use at a formal dinner, to learning the pronunciation of strange words--we learn by watching others for cues, then follow their lead. When we do so, whether as faddish followers of fashion or lip-sync stars, we rely on a powerful, instinctive talent for imitation.
“Even at birth we can imitate,” said Iacoboni. “We have this built-in mechanism that allows us to imitate both movements and facial expressions we see in other people.
“The same regions of the brain that send commands to our muscles when we act also seem able to recognize the same action when performed by others,” he said. “We believe that this brain mechanism allows us to understand the intentions of others.”
Once researchers better understand the neural anatomy of learning, they hope to use those insights to create more effective rehabilitation techniques for people recovering from brain injuries. Eventually, they could also lead to more effective classroom teaching techniques.
“There is a tremendous amount of interest in the idea that you can understand better ways to teach by understanding how the brain is set up to learn,” said John C. Mazziotta, director of UCLA’s brain mapping center at the School of Medicine.
As a basic neural process, imitation itself may be as old as monkey see and monkey do.
Recent studies with macaques have shown that other primates have special “mirror” neurons in some parts of the brain that become active when matching another monkey’s behavior. The neurons were detected in an area of the primate pre-motor cortex that fired when a monkey grasped an object and also when it saw another monkey do the same thing.
“It was a very important question--to see if there is [the same] mirror activity in the human brain, and, if there is, where it is located,” Iacoboni said.
Identifying the copycat circuits in the human brain turned out to be as simple as lifting a finger.
To see if imitation was embodied in the human brain, Iacoboni, working with UCLA neuroscientists Mazziotta and Roger P. Woods, conducted a series of experiments in which volunteers were asked to perform a series of simple hand gestures while their brains were monitored in an fMRI scanner.
A Random Hand Points the Way
The volunteers were put through three variations of the test: They first were shown photographs of a hand randomly lifting its index or middle finger, then asked to match the gesture in sequence, and, finally, to look at abstract graphic images that just suggested the gesture. The experiment was kept as simple as possible to minimize unrelated brain activity.
By monitoring millisecond by millisecond changes in neural blood flow, the scanner recorded which parts of the brain were most active during each phase of the experiment.
Two areas became especially active--a portion of the right parietal cortex involved with precise physical movement, and a region of the brain called Broca’s area, a key language center that may be involved in planning the goal of the physical movement.
Researchers were especially intrigued that the neural anatomy of imitation encompassed regions known to be responsible for humanity’s unique language ability.
“There is a lot of speculation about the possibility that mirror neurons might play a key role in language and language development,” Woods said. “This is speculation, but the language you learn and the way you produce it may be the product . . . perhaps to a profound degree, of this way of imitation.”
The ability to imitate other people’s behavior, Arbib at USC said, “extends crucially to language, where we must be able to imitate others to acquire the words and grammar that characterize our own [native] language.”
The fact that both language and motor control areas are involved in imitation suggests that, in humanity’s most distant past, hand gestures and the ability to mirror them may have been much more important in human communication than today. Arbib and other experts suggest that a vocabulary of hand signals may have preceded speech in the evolution of language.
“What adds to the richness of this insight is that it is based on a search for basic mechanisms which are shared by the brains of humans and monkeys,” he said. And that can help scientists learn “what aspects are unique to the development of the human species over the last 100,000 years or so.”
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Robert Lee Hotz can be reached at lee.hotz@latimes.com
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
The Copycat Brain
The brain is built to imitate, UCLA researchers have discovered. Using an experimental neural imaging technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a simple but sophisticated thought experiment, they captured images of the copycat brain in action.
Sources: Science, UCLA Brain Mapping Division
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2ededfebc5befaf267740c8103e57f56 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-20-me-32072-story.html | Laker’s Marriage Plans Are the Talk of His Fiancee’s High School | Laker’s Marriage Plans Are the Talk of His Fiancee’s High School
Marina High School was afire Friday with word that one of its own, Vanessa Laine, is preparing to marry the man who may be Southern California’s most eligible bachelor: Kobe Bryant.
The Laker superstar, 21, confirmed after practice Thursday that he is engaged to the 18-year-old Marina High senior.
A day later, the inevitable television vans swarmed the school, going live, interviewing students who unwittingly strolled off campus for lunch. Overhead, a television helicopter recorded video footage.
Rumors sprang up: She will now be home-schooled (true); they are going to skip the prom in June (probably true); they are going to Italy instead (unconfirmed); the school has asked her to stop wearing her seven-carat engagement ring (not true). And there were tales, many of them, of Kobe sightings. Most of them went something like this, from junior Erika McWilliams:
“I met him. I swear. I saw his forehead when he came to pick her up at school. I was all: Whoa! And I ran up to the car and I was all: Omigod! And he was all: Hi! And I was all: It’s all about Kobe! I was shaking.”
At the modest home in Huntington Beach where Laine lives with her grandparents, her grandfather sighed heavily as a reporter approached the door.
Yes, Robert Laine said, they are engaged. No, they probably will not be going to the prom, though they had considered it. Yes, she has been taken out of school “because of the notoriety.” And yes, she is thrilled.
“When you are young, you are very idealistic,” he said. “She seems happy.”
And then, of course, there is The Ring. The Rock.
Even Marina High School Principal Carol Osbring, who remained tight-lipped about the mania, refusing to utter Vanessa Laine’s name, was marveling at the ring.
“All the diamonds I’m used to seeing are little things you kind of flick in the sun,” she said.
Not this one. Not unless you want to go blind. Seven carats, according to Sandy Fredlund, manager of an Orange County Zales jewelry store, is the size of a nickel, maybe even a quarter, and probably cost about $100,000.
“I was thinking about that ring all the way into work this morning,” Fredlund said. “The largest thing I have in my store is a two-carat. And that’s big. This is huge.”
The couple met when Bryant, who likes rap and videos, stopped by a music video shoot where Laine was working as a background model, according to Marina High drama teacher Robert Rotenberry.
Laine, who turned 18 recently, is active in Marina’s theater club but has no aspirations to be a professional actress. Rotenberry described her as “very pleasant, very nice, extra-outgoing.”
She has completed advanced math classes, such as algebra II, and diligently went about her work as a teacher’s aide, according to teachers for whom she ran errands and took roll call. She is an aspiring makeup artist and a periodic video model.
“She’s a pretty cool chick,” said Ricky Avila, 17, a junior who shared a math class with her.
According to acquaintances, a photo of the couple kissing is affixed to the binder that holds her class notes.
“She never showed off. She said to me once, ‘Here’s a picture of my boyfriend,’ and I looked at it and thought, ‘I know that guy,’ ” Rotenberry said. “She was just really proud of him.”
Family and friends are working hard to protect Laine’s privacy. Her grandfather is hoping the attention will fade soon.
Still, his granddaughter’s life is about to change forever. Bryant, who is in his fourth year with the Lakers after making the leap from high school directly to the NBA, recently signed a six-year contract extension reportedly worth $70 million.
The contract will take him through the 2004-05 season, when he will be 26. She will be 23.
“There’s nobody in [the school] who isn’t talking about it,” said Graham Finochio, 16, a junior. “We all heard about it for a while: Yeah, Kobe Bryant is going out with this chick, and he sends her flowers and stuff. And I was like: Yeah, right. And then it turns out to be true! And I was like: Whoa, dude!”
Times staff writer Rene Lynch contributed to this story.
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076e27e7a6124289e88adf25fd32ff99 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-23-me-33222-story.html | ‘First Light’: New Dawn for Danielpour | ‘First Light’: New Dawn for Danielpour
Composed in 1988, “First Light” by Pacific Symphony composer-in-residence Richard Danielpour is not exactly a new work. But it was the turning point for the 44-year-old New York composer.
“That piece doesn’t sound like anything I wrote previously,” Danielpour said in a recent interview from his New York home. “It sounds a lot like what followed.”
The work will be performed by the Pacific Symphony, led by Carl St.Clair, on Wednesday and Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. The program will also include Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Leonard Bernstein’s “Benediction.”
“As it was happening, I knew something was occurring which was completely different from anything I had done,” Danielpour said.
Originally for 17 instruments, “First Light"--in four continuous but contrasting sections--was commissioned by Gerard Schwarz for the “Music Today” series in New York and the Seattle Symphony.
A year later, Danielpour created a version for full orchestra, which was first heard at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival in Germany in 1989 as part of a summer tour supervised by Leonard Bernstein.
Bernstein was taking six young American composers and conductors--three of each--to Europe. The list included Danielpour and St.Clair, the Pacific’s music director.
“I remember at a rehearsal, Bernstein turned to me and said, ‘This piece is about a search for a certain kind of harmony,’ ” the composer said. “That’s not just the harmony of D major that comes at the end, but about a search for a certain kind of harmony, as in peacefully.”
The work is Danielpour’s most frequently performed piece, passing its 100th performance several years ago.
“Every year since its inception, it has been played somewhere,” Danielpour said.
“When I look back on it, it’s pretty good writing, especially for a 32-year-old. But the thing I find very often is I think my earlier work is harder to play than my recent work. If I knew then what I know now about writing for orchestra instruments, it wouldn’t be quite so difficult.”
* Carl St.Clair will conduct the Pacific Symphony in Richard Danielpour’s “First Light” on a program that also includes Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Leonard Bernstein’s “Benediction” on Wednesday and Thursday, 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $18 to $50. ($10 student/senior rush tickets.) (714) 556-2787.
*
Chris Pasles can be reached at (714) 966-5602 or by e-mail at chris.pasles@latimes.com.
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b8ffcbc85409d030752de8ecc765d3a9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-24-mn-33499-story.html | Davis Fights to Suspend Licenses in Drug Cases | Davis Fights to Suspend Licenses in Drug Cases
Smoke a joint. Get caught. Lose your driver’s license for six months.
To Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, who has labored to fashion a tougher-than-thou image on law-and-order issues, treatment of those busted for even minor drug offenses should be that simple and severe.
But to the more liberal Democrats who control the California Legislature, a push by Davis to revive a stiff drug policy championed by former U.S drug czar William J. Bennett a decade ago goes way too far--and many are vowing to block it.
It all stems from a 1990 federal law that threatened to slash transportation funding for states unless they do one of two things: Approve a six-month driving suspension for anyone convicted of a drug offense, or pass a resolution declaring a refusal to do so. The state previously implemented the policy, but allowed it to expire.
“Why the governor is so intrigued with this I do not know,” said Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco). “This is silly. It’s stupid. It’s an intrusion by the feds into state laws. They’re blackmailing us to do something.”
Under the suspension law pushed by the federal legislation, violators would not have to be behind the wheel or in a car to lose driving privileges--which has outraged civil libertarians, who see no connection between the punishment and the crime, and labor unions, which worry that minor offenses might prevent their members from getting to work.
“To workers whose livelihood is dependent on the ability to drive, either at work or to and from work, loss of a driver’s license can be equivalent to loss of employment,” wrote Tom Rankin, president of the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, recently to lawmakers.
In statehouses from Maine to Washington, deciding which course to follow on the “smoke a joint, lose your license” law, as it is known, has proved controversial, and California is no exception. Thirty-two states have opted out, while 18, including California, have chosen to pass laws revoking the licenses.
But California’s law--which has resulted in as many as 100,000 suspensions a year, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles--recently expired. And Davis is intent on bringing it back, despite objections from lawmakers.
“It is certainly consistent with the governor’s approach to being tough on crime,” said Davis spokeswoman Hilary McLean. “If you are using drugs, you should not be behind the wheel.”
From the outset, the issue of whether to suspend drivers’ licenses for minor drug offenses has sparked explosive debate in Sacramento, which traditionally treated possession of a small amount of marijuana as severely as running a red light.
Legislators tried to waive the requirement in 1992, but Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, a strong supporter of suspending the licenses, vetoed the state Senate bill. Two years later, fearing the loss of hundreds of millions of federal dollars, lawmakers approved a Wilson-backed bill that imposed the suspensions for one year.
Efforts to permanently resolve the dispute faltered until 1996, when lawmakers passed a bill that reinstated the sanctions for just six months. Fed up by the state’s failure to pass permanent legislation, U.S. Transportation Secretary Federico Pena notified California that it was not meeting the federal law’s requirements, and threatened to place 10% of the state’s transportation funding in a reserve fund.
A year later, lawmakers passed two pieces of legislation that many in the capitol believed took care of the controversy once and for all. An Assembly bill extended imposition of the six-month suspensions until June 1999. And a Senate bill declared that when that deadline passed, California would opt out from there on.
Confused, federal officials sent a letter to Davis last year, saying the state was not in compliance. Davis wrote back, explaining the legislative tango and stating that the obligations had, indeed, been met.
That satisfied the folks in Washington. But at the letter’s end, Davis made his intentions clear. Even though California had bowed out, he liked the law--and he was going to reignite the debate this year.
A Davis-backed bill by Assemblyman Dean Florez (D-Shafter) does just that. In addition to once again suspending the licenses of all drug violators for six months, it would require one-year suspensions of driving privileges for violators younger than 21.
When the legislation encountered its first test in the lower house, however, it almost died because of opposition from Democrats. Not a single Democrat voted for it initially, and only a series of angry phone calls from the governor to legislative leaders saved it, several lawmakers confirmed.
Assemblyman Fred Keeley (D-Boulder Creek) was one of those who changed his vote to allow the measure to clear the Public Safety Committee, part of an agreement between Davis and Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks) to keep it moving forward while negotiations continue.
Though he let it slide to be a “team player,” Keeley said with more than a hint of sarcasm, he made it clear that his opposition to such a law remains strong.
“I personally don’t believe there is a nexus between these issues,” he said. “If someone is convicted of driving under the influence, I am not opposed to punishment that forces them to lose their license. If someone is caught at home smoking a joint, I am not sure how that is related to driving a car at all.
“There wasn’t a statement ever made on the floor [in 1997] that said if you pass these measures you will never have to deal with this again, but implicit was exactly that,” he added. “Now it has all gotten tied up again like a bowl of spaghetti.”
Though Davis appears to be having some success shepherding his proposal through the Assembly, Burton predicted it would meet a harsher fate in the Senate. If Davis manages to get his bill out of the Assembly, which is a longshot, he will face an even stronger challenge in the Senate.
“Davis can make all the calls he wants, but I don’t see this getting out of a Senate committee,” Burton said. “I don’t condone drug use. But why someone who gets caught smoking a joint at a New Year’s Eve party should lose their license is beyond me.”
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ab4b7afce1b1f542cfc6ed5a38ee6c9a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-26-mn-34254-story.html | $15.3-Billion Bailout for Farmers Is OKd | $15.3-Billion Bailout for Farmers Is OKd
Congress approved a $15.3-billion package of programs to aid financially distressed farmers, marking the third bailout for agriculture since legislation intended to wean farmers off federal subsidies was passed four years ago. The legislation would make it cheaper for farmers to buy insurance to protect against crop failure while pumping an additional $8.2 billion into the beleaguered Federal Crop Insurance Program. Congress also included $7.1 billion of “emergency” spending.
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1ac2d0a4f96dc188bdacda1868791804 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-28-ca-34865-story.html | Chinatown: The New Hot Spot | Chinatown: The New Hot Spot
“Shops are open” is the message on a faded red banner stretched between two lampposts at the entrance of Chinatown Plaza West. So are a batch of contemporary art galleries. Dead as the pedestrian zone on Chung King Road may appear--and even though most of the galleries are only open Thursday through Saturday afternoons--an influx of edgy, young art has brought fresh life to this shabby side of Hill Street.
Attracted by low rent, the urban scene and downtown cultural institutions, pioneering entrepreneurs have taken over shops that formerly dispensed Chinese goods. Instead of cloisonne bowls, jade jewelry, embroidered silk jackets and painted fans, enterprising young art dealers offer Jon Pylychuk’s mixed-media panels depicting weird little characters who just want to be loved; Beatrice Dreux’s Expressionistic paintings of female nudes; and Loren Sandvik’s vacuum-form reliefs of faces and feet in pure white plastic.
The phenomenon of the Chinatown art scene began in January 1999 with China Art Objects, a scruffy storefront gallery at 933 Chung King Road, currently crammed with Pylychuk’s work. The following month, INMO opened in a larger space at No. 971. Then came the Black Dragon Society, in a former kung fu studio (No. 961); and Goldman Tevis, in an airy space previously occupied by a Chinese arts and crafts emporium (No. 932). Meanwhile, across Hill Street and around the corner, at 427 Bernard St., Acuna-Hansen Gallery opened a spartan white exhibition space.
Strolling down Chung King Road, it isn’t immediately apparent that this is the L.A. art scene’s new hot spot. China Art Objects and the Black Dragon have retained the signs of their predecessors. Goldman Tevis’ name appears in tiny letters on the gallery window, but the name of the former occupant looms much larger, even though it’s been covered with a thin coat of paint.
But that’s part of what the dealers like about their new digs. John Tevis said he and his partner, Mary Goldman, both transplanted New Yorkers, were drawn to Chinatown because of its ambience. “This is a great street,” Tevis said. “There are people living upstairs above the shops, kids play basketball on the street, and there’s great food. It’s a real place.”
Planning to “mix it up in terms of geography,” he and Goldman will show works by young artists from Los Angeles, New York and Europe, particularly London and Berlin. As for the prevailing aesthetic, “I favor work that looks as good as it thinks,” Tevis said. “I’m a sucker for a pretty picture, but I’m most interested in work that moves the practice along.”
*
Inmo Yuon, owner of INMO, said it’s high time for central L.A. to have a lively gallery scene. The galleries that sprouted in downtown industrial zones during the early 1980s, when the Museum of Contemporary Art was taking shape, are long gone. But this is a more propitious time because several major arts institutions are now in place, he said. “We are really close to MOCA, Disney Hall and the Colburn School for Performing Arts, and SCI-Arc [Southern California Institute of Architecture] is moving downtown.”
Still, the Chinatown scene is something of a work in progress--and that, too, is part of its appeal. Showing new art in a wide variety of media requires flexibility, so exhibition schedules tend to be in flux. Yuon will extend his current group show of figurative art to Saturday--a week longer than planned--to coordinate with the other galleries’ schedules. But then he’ll close for a month or so while Tim Doyle builds a room-size sculptural installation in the gallery.
Chris Hansen of Acuna-Hansen--which is showing Sandvik’s white plastic pieces to Saturday--concentrates on young L.A. artists. But he has no desire to tie himself down to a single geographic area or a long-term schedule. “I plan a couple of months ahead, but that leaves a lot of freedom,” he said. “If I see work I like, I can just say, ‘Hey.’ ”
NORTON GRANTS: Karin Higa, senior curator and director of the curatorial and exhibitions department at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, and Brian Wallis, director of exhibitions and chief curator of the International Center of Photography in New York, are this year’s winners of the Peter Norton Family Foundation’s grants to curators of contemporary art. Higa and Wallis will each receive $50,000 from the foundation to acquire contemporary artworks for their museums.
“This is a lot of money for us,” said Higa, who joined the museum’s staff in 1991. “It will have a big impact on our ability to acquire contemporary art and to shape our collection, which is mostly historical.” The money will be used to buy works by living Japanese American artists, she said. Curators do not apply for the annual grants, so winning one was a big surprise for Higa. “It took me a couple of days just to get over the shock,” she said.
Among the exhibitions she has organized are “The View From Within: Japanese American Art From the Internment Camps, 1942-1945,” a traveling show that made its debut at the UCLA Wight Art Gallery in 1992, and “Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter and Modern Romance,” which inaugurated the Japanese American National Museum’s new building in January 1999.
Wallis, who got his curatorial start at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in the 1980s and assumed his current position last year, is best known as a writer and editor. His publications include “Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation” (1984), “Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists” (1987) and “Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America” (1999).
VIRTUAL AIDES: The Estate Project for Artists With Aids--a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting artists with HIV/AIDS to continue and preserve their work--is increasing the presence of its Virtual Collection. An online resource that documents the cultural impact of AIDS, the collection consists of more than 3,000 high-resolution digital images created by 150 visual artists who have died of AIDS or are living with HIV.
As part of a continuing effort to make the artists’ work more available to arts professionals and the public, the collection’s Internet site, https://www.artistswithaids.org, has been expanded with upgraded technology and new software, developed by Luna Imaging in Venice. The site also provides access to a new online journal, Artery, conceived as a forum for cultural issues pertaining to AIDS. In addition, a national public exhibition of the Virtual Collection will be launched in December 2001 at Parsons School of Design in New York.
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c2de25827167a465dba78dd839a29f93 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-28-mn-35027-story.html | Iran’s Reformist Parliament Opens Session | Iran’s Reformist Parliament Opens Session
Opening Iran’s new reformist-dominated parliament Saturday, President Mohammad Khatami called for an end to factional wrangling in a nation where reformers and hard-liners have been struggling for the power to shape society.
The convening of the 290-seat Majlis came three months after reformist Khatami allies won about three-fourths of the seats in nationwide elections, taking the reins from lawmakers who want no dilution of Iran’s Islam-guided laws. It was the first time that the hard-liners had lost control of parliament since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
“Society is now waiting to be rid of . . . certain political disputes which perhaps are not that unusual and abnormal, given our current political circumstances,” Khatami told the deputies Saturday. “The Majlis, for its part, must act with wisdom and adroitness.”
Many of the laws that have been in place since the revolution are unpopular because they restrict personal freedoms. The reformist victory in parliament raised hopes that such laws will be eased.
“This is a new era for reforms. Our top priority will be to ease the crackdown on the press,” said Ahmad Borqani, a leading reformist parliament member.
But despite the election, the power struggle is far from over. Since it became apparent that reformers had taken the elections, there has been a strong backlash by the hard-liners, who control the judiciary, the security forces and the state broadcast media.
The Council of Guardians, an election supervisory body controlled by conservatives, delayed endorsing the parliamentary results for three months, alleging fraud. The hard-liners have shut down 17 reformist newspapers in the past month and jailed several reformist leaders.
Besides supervising the elections, the Council of Guardians also has the final say on new legislation--a potential stumbling block for reformist lawmakers.
Still, the convening of parliament on time is an indication that the reformers are not without influence. In the absence of any interference, they will at least be able to make themselves heard, as all parliamentary proceedings must be broadcast live by state media.
Saturday’s inauguration ceremony began with the playing of the national anthem and the reading of verses from Islam’s holy book, the Koran.
In a sign of boldness, two female reformist legislators attended the ceremony dressed in manteaus, or long jackets, their hair covered with scarves, instead of the traditional chador, a floor-length loose sheet worn over the head and body. While both are acceptable under the Islamic dress code, no woman has sat in the Majlis without a chador since the revolution.
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e65722034b6f2027bcb849c3214acaad | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-28-sp-35110-story.html | Rocket Richard, the Pride of the Canadiens, Dead at 78 | Rocket Richard, the Pride of the Canadiens, Dead at 78
Maurice Richard, whose fiery gaze and swift shot intimidated countless goaltenders during his Hall of Fame career with the Montreal Canadiens, died Saturday in Montreal.
Richard, 78, succumbed to the combined effects of a cancerous abdominal tumor and Parkinson’s disease. Medication for those ailments, and the osteoarthritis that most recently plagued him, rendered the onetime firebrand and opinionated newspaper columnist only intermittently lucid in his final days at Hotel-Dieu Hospital.
Richard, nicknamed “Rocket” for his speed, strength and indomitable will, became the NHL’s first 50-goal scorer in 1944-45 and the first to score 500 goals, in 1957-58. His record of 50 goals in 50 games was untouched until 1981, when it was matched by Mike Bossy of the New York Islanders; it wasn’t broken until Wayne Gretzky scored 50 in 39 games in the 1981-82 season.
“When he came flying toward you with the puck on his stick, his eyes were all lit up, flashing and gleaming like a pinball machine,” Hall of Fame goalie Glenn Hall once said. “It was terrifying.”
Richard, a Montreal native who played on eight Stanley Cup championship teams with the Canadiens, was hospitalized two years ago when doctors discovered his tumor. However, he responded well to treatments and was able to resume working as an ambassador for the Canadiens. After saying for many years the NHL should create a trophy for the top goal scorer, he presented the first Maurice Richard trophy to the NHL’s most prolific goal scorer, Teemu Selanne of the Mighty Ducks, at a 1999 ceremony in Toronto.
The son of a machinist for the Canadian Pacific Railway, Richard suffered a broken ankle and a broken arm early in his career and developed a reputation for being injury prone. However, coach Dick Irvin recognized the youngster’s skill and kept him with the team in 1943. Irvin later put Richard on the right side with Toe Blake and Elmer Lach, a trio that was known as the “Punch Line” for its scoring exploits. Richard was voted to the NHL’s first all-star team at right wing eight times and the second team six times. He also led the league in goals five times and was voted the most valuable player in 1947.
He passed Nels Stewart to become the NHL’s leading goal scorer, with 325, on Nov. 8, 1952, and scored his 500th goal on Oct. 19, 1957. He scored 544 goals, which stood until Gordie Howe surpassed it in 1963. His single-season record of 50 goals stood until Bobby Hull scored 54 in 1965-66.
After playing 18 seasons--the last five with his younger brother, Henri--he retired in 1960 after leading the Canadiens to an unprecedented and still unmatched fifth consecutive championship. But such was his stature in Montreal and the predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec that 40 years later, when King left wing Luc Robitaille passed Richard’s 544 goals, Robitaille spoke of him reverently, even though Richard had retired six years before Robitaille was born.
“It’s pretty special. He meant everything to the people of Quebec and to do this is a privilege,” Robitaille said. “I’m awed to be mentioned with him. He’s the Rocket. To any kid growing up in Montreal, he’s still the greatest.
“The older people would tell us about him and it was like we knew him.”
Richard always insisted, “I was just another hockey player,” but he became a symbol for other Francophones for succeeding in a largely English-speaking world. He was also credited with awakening pride among French-Canadians in a prelude to the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s that saw a resurgence of the French language and culture.
“Of course he was much more than just a hockey player,” author and longtime newspaper writer Red Fisher wrote in his 1994 book, “Hockey, Heroes and Me.”
“It wasn’t just that he was a winner during his 18 seasons with the Canadiens, it was the way he won. He could lift a team, province, and at times even a country into a frenzy of winning. He pushed himself to the brink, and when he and the team won, ‘his people’ imagined themselves winners as well. . . .
“With Richard, the eyes had it. They were coal-black, wet, and shining with the intensity he brought to every game. No wonder he lit up every arena in which he performed. It was the menace implicit in him each time he swooped in on an opposing goaltender, often with another player clinging to his back. It was in his arms and in the barrel of his chest which threatened to burst his sweater at any moment. It was in the tight line of his mouth, and in the snarl it formed when he was challenged.”
Richard was also the central figure in one of the NHL’s darkest moments: the “Richard Riots” of 1955.
Known as much for his hot temper as his quick shot, Richard had had several run-ins with authority; he had attacked a referee in a hotel lobby and called NHL President Clarence Campbell “a dictator” in his newspaper column. On March 13, 1955, in a game at Boston, Richard snapped, striking Boston’s Hal Laycoe with his stick and punching linesman Cliff Thompson when Thompson intervened.
Campbell suspended Richard for the last three games of the season and the entire playoffs, costing Richard a chance at winning the NHL scoring title. Irate Canadien fans made threatening phone calls to Campbell’s Montreal office, but he ignored them and attended the Canadiens’ next home game, March 17 against Detroit. He was physically and verbally attacked by fans and declared the game a forfeit after the first period with the Red Wings leading, 4-1. Fans began throwing bottles, rocks and ice through the windows of the Forum and quickly moved out onto St. Catherine Street, where they broke windows and looted stores.
Only a plea from Richard on a French radio station restored calm. “My dear friends, because I always try so hard to win and had my trouble at Boston, I was suspended,” he said. “I will take my punishment and come back next year to help the club and the younger players to win the Stanley Cup.”
That he did, in a run no team has matched.
“It may have been the best team of magical talents ever assembled,” Fisher wrote, “but what made it truly special was that its leader was Rocket Richard. He exemplified what winning was all about--to the people, as well as to a team.”
After his retirement, Richard did public relations work for a brewery and ran a fishing line company. He coached the Quebec Nordiques of the World Hockey Assn., but resigned after two games because of nervous exhaustion. When the Canadiens left the Montreal Forum in 1996, Richard received the loudest ovation among the former players invited to the occasion, and he wept unabashedly at center ice.
“When God created the perfect goal scorer,” referee Red Storey once said, “it came in the form of the Rocket.”
Richard, whose wife, Lucille, died in 1994, is survived by seven children and 14 grandchildren.
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64e4fe588d4fb9f9bf35fac70fe5a9a5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-03-ca-46141-story.html | Talk-Radio KRLA Will Become All-Sports | Talk-Radio KRLA Will Become All-Sports
Sports junkies looking for a fix will be able to find it 24 hours a day at KRLA-AM (1110) starting Dec. 1, while fans of the station’s current talk-radio format will have to hunt elsewhere on the dial for their favorite shows.
The change was put in motion by Viacom’s decision to sell the station to the Walt Disney Co., which--while awaiting federal approval of the deal--will begin managing the operation at the beginning of the month. When it does take over Dec. 1, Disney will turn KRLA into an ESPN Radio outlet, featuring sports talk and sporting events all day, all week. Additionally, KRLA’s call letters will change once the sale is finalized next year, though the new ones have yet to be determined.
For the record:
12:00 AM, Nov. 06, 2000 For the Record Los Angeles Times Monday November 6, 2000 Home Edition Calendar Part F Page 2 Entertainment Desk 3 inches; 82 words Type of Material: Correction Radio title and owner--An article about KRLA-AM (1110) in Friday’s Calendar mistakenly said that Erik Braverman would become general manager of the station when Walt Disney Co. begins operating it Dec. 1 as the first stage of Disney’s acquisition of the station. Braverman will become program director at KRLA while continuing in the same capacity at Disney-owned KABC-AM (790). Bill Sommers remains president and general manager of all the local Disney-owned radio stations. Additionally, KLOS-FM (95.5) is owned by Disney, not Infinity Broadcasting, as stated in the article.
The imminent change has the station’s current personalities searching for new homes.
“I’m considering three different situations at the moment,” all in the Los Angeles area, said Michael Jackson, host of his namesake morning talk show, and a local radio institution. “I’m truly excited by what’s been offered, but I can’t say anything yet.” One offer, from KABC-AM (790), where Jackson had been for 32 years before going to KRLA two years ago, was on the table, but Jackson said they couldn’t come to terms.
“I leave this station with great regret,” he added. “Nobody blames the station. It’s not like they fired everybody. It was the FCC’s doing.”
When Viacom and CBS joined a little more than a year ago, in a $35-billion merger that was the largest in media history, the deal gave Viacom one television station and eight radio stations in the Los Angeles area--one more property than the Federal Communications Commission allows. So Viacom’s radio subsidiary, Infinity Broadcasting Corp., put KRLA on the market earlier this year, filing paperwork with the FCC Oct. 26 that initiated the sale to Disney, which owns ABC, the majority of ESPN, and baseball’s Angels and hockey’s Mighty Ducks.
“We knew that eventually it had to be sold,” Jackson said. “It had been rumored for about a year. I thought quite honestly they’d be able to stall. We worked at it as though it was going to be forever.”
Disney will take over the station under a Local Market Agreement, an FCC provision that allows the purchaser to operate the station while awaiting approval from that agency, the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department. Bill Sommers, president and general manager of the four local Disney-owned radio stations, said the deal should be final by March.
KRLA currently broadcasts some sports programming, including horse racing, Kings hockey and San Diego Chargers football games. Those contracts will run through the sports’ seasons, with KRLA’s new management deciding whether to renew the contracts.
But time is running out for the station’s non-sports programming.
Dr. Toni Grant, the pioneer of radio call-in psychology, moves Nov. 13 from KRLA to KABC, where she started her show in the mid-1970s. She currently airs noon-3 p.m. weekdays, but will move to 9 p.m.-midnight at KABC. Chef Jamie Gwen, whose cooking show “ChefTalk” last ran on KRLA Sundays 6-7 p.m., will move to KIEV-AM (870) this Sunday, when the show will begin airing from 9-10 a.m.
“I had a terrific run on KRLA. It was an incredible station with a terrific lineup and a great group of people,” Gwen said, praising station management for handling “the changeover very kindly.”
“I really do feel all the hosts have been treated with great consideration and respect,” such as being allowed to tell their listeners where they’re moving to, said Gwen, whose program offers cooking advice, listener call-ins and celebrity chef appearances.
Coincidentally, she had already been planning her move to KIEV, for a chance at a larger audience. Meanwhile, hosts of other shows are still working to relocate.
The deal involving KRLA also includes the sale of an AM station in Sacramento, KRAK, which will become a Radio Disney outlet--like KDIS-AM (710)-- featuring music and contests for the 12-and-under set, Sommers said. But Disney is especially interested in having an ESPN station in the L.A. area, Sommers added, because it plans to open an ESPN SportsZone sports bar at the California Experience, the new Disney theme park in Anaheim.
In addition, the new station will offer chances at cross-promotions with Infinity station KLOS-FM (95.5), whose hard-rock format meshes with the predominantly young and male audience of ESPN, said Erik Braverman, program director at KABC, who will become general manager overseeing both KABC and KRLA.
“Once the approvals are done, we can officially say what some of the plans are,” Braverman said. “The company has made no secret we want to have a presence in Los Angeles. It’s obvious Los Angeles is a very important market for any radio company. ESPN is synonymous with sports. There’s a huge identifiable brand name here. We believe there is a lot of sports stuff out there, but nothing with the ESPN banner behind it. And we think it’s extremely strong.”
In addition to sporting events, the ESPN Radio station will feature call-in and interview shows hosted by Dan Patrick and others known primarily for their work on ESPN’s cable TV network. But Jackson bemoaned the loss of a distinctive voice from L.A. airwaves.
“Any time you lose a station like KRLA, there’s a hole, there’s a gap,” he said. While he said KRLA’s onetime rival, KABC, features “mostly conservative talk-show hosts, our station was open to a variety of views. I think there’s room for another talk station.
“I can’t see how the city needs another sports station,” Jackson added.
As Gwen put it, “I think talk radio is important. It gives the listenership a forum. It offers different views and perspectives. . . . We all hate to see something wonderful go.”
*
The Sports Story
* Can Los Angeles handle another all-sports radio station? Larry Stewart details KRLA’s changeover. D6
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c703bcb35a8d05aa0a0cc9a09553d864 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-05-tr-47253-story.html | La Canada Flintridge Keeps Its Focus on Trails | La Canada Flintridge Keeps Its Focus on Trails
In the early 1900s, outdoors enthusiast and real estate developer Frank Flint created and marketed a woodsy suburb laced with riding and hiking trails in the San Rafael Hills in L.A. County. Flintridge, as the community was dubbed, has been attractive to resident ramblers and visiting hikers ever since. The area’s trail system and still-undeveloped hillsides have long been considered community assets and are fiercely defended by conservation-minded citizens.
Every community should be as hiker-friendly. Footpaths and fire roads link La Canada Flintridge with the Arroyo Seco and the Rose Bowl in Pasadena and the extensive trail system of the San Gabriel Mountains.
An ambitious LaCF (as locals abbreviate it) resident could conceivably hike on trails from the ‘burbs to the top of Mt. Baldy. A sister range to the nearby Verdugo Mountains, the San Rafael Hills make a natural border between the busy San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys. The hills are similar in composition (highly fractured metamorphic rocks) to the Verdugos, but lower (Flint Peak is tops at 1,889 feet) and more extensively weathered and eroded.
The lower reaches of the San Rafaels have been settled--"mansionized,” as some residents grouse--while the upper ramparts are untouched. During the 1990s, local conservationists thwarted developers intent on building dozens of huge haciendas atop the crest of the hills.
Travelers get a bird’s-eye view of the San Rafael Hills while motoring along the Glendale Freeway between Glendale and La Canada Flintridge.
Cherry Canyon is a good place to begin a short hike into the San Rafael Hills. The trail system here is in good shape and features first-rate signage, thanks to the efforts of the city and the La Canada Flintridge Trails Council.
Some blackened slopes bear witness to a December 1999 brush fire that raced across the hills. The fire’s flash point was a faulty transformer on a power pole very near the Cherry Canyon trail head. Sometimes nature’s rapid regeneration is remarkable; the tenacious chaparral has already grown phoenix-like from the ashes to repopulate the hillsides.
My only complaint about roaming these hills was getting hoodwinked (by a trail map and trail signs) into hiking to Descanso Gardens. I figured I’d trek a couple of miles across the hills to Descanso, saunter through the rose gardens, enjoy lunch there, then stroll La Canada Flintridge’s handsome tree-lined streets back to the trail head at Cherry Canyon.
I figured wrong.
When I neared the gardens, my first thought was that I had missed a critical junction and somehow ended up at the perimeter of a penitentiary. A towering chain-link fence topped by barbed wire stopped me in my tracks. From the way the barbed wire was positioned, I deduced such security measures were devised not to keep camellias from escaping the gardens but to prevent hikers from entering Descanso without paying the entrance fee.
Given the community’s century-long trails advocacy, I have no doubt La Canada Flintridge will one day fill in the gaps in its trail system, construct a few connector trails and create an even better network of pathways that encourages longer hikes.
Directions to trail head: From the Glendale Freeway (California 2), just south of its junction with the Foothill Freeway (Interstate 210) in La Canada Flintridge, exit on Verdugo Boulevard. Turn right (east) and drive 0.3 mile to Descanso Drive. Turn right and proceed 0.7 mile to Chevy Chase Drive. Turn right, then soon make another right onto Hampstead Road, which you’ll follow on a 0.5-mile ascent to the signed turnoff for Cherry Canyon Open Space. Park alongside the preserve’s access road near the signed Owl Trail.
The hike: Owl Trail meanders up oak- and sycamore-shaded Cherry Canyon. You’ll soon encounter a short (200-foot) connector trail with a sign that directs you to Cerro Negro Trail. Ignore this trail and continue on Owl Trail, which all too soon leaves the cool recesses of the canyon and ascends onto brushy and still-fire-blackened slopes.
About 0.3 mile from the trail head, you’ll reach a signed junction with Cerro Negro Trail, which contours south over to Lookout Tower. For a more direct route to the top, continue straight on Owl Trail on a steep 0.2-mile ascent to the main dirt fire road on the ridge crest.
You’ll spot a fire lookout tower; bear left and hike south toward it. The faded green tower, perched on steel framing, must have given fire lookouts of yesteryear quite a good view of the San Rafael Hills, Verdugo Mountains, San Gabriel Mountains, San Gabriel Valley and more. At 1,887 feet, the unnamed peak where the now-retired tower rests is only 2 feet shorter than Flint Peak, high point of the hills.
After enjoying the view, double back north on the fire road, past Owl Trail, to a major signed junction that offers an opportunity to travel 0.9 mile to Descanso Gardens’ rear gate or 1.1 miles to the Verdugo Hills Hospital Overlook. This option travels along the ridgeline and offers excellent valley views.
Just remember that this hike follows a road to nowhere: The garden gate is locked, and the hospital overlook puts you at roof level of the hospital. Continue on the main fire road to signed Liz’s Loop, which honors longtime trails activist Liz Blackwelder, president of the La Canada Flintridge Trails Council. This pleasant path swings east, then southwest as it loops 1.2 miles through the burn zone back to Cherry Canyon Fire Road. Walk down the fire road to the trail head.
For more of John McKinney’s hiking tips and trails, visit Internet https://www.thetrailmaster.com.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Owl, Liz’s Loop, Cerro Negro Trails WHERE: Cherry Canyon Open Space.
TERRAIN: Steep, brushy slopes.
HIGHLIGHTS: Clear-day vistas of mountains and metropolis.
DISTANCE: From Cherry Canyon Open Space to Lookout Tower is 1.5 miles round trip with 400-foot elevation gain; return via Liz’s Loop is 2.5 miles round trip. To Hospital Overlook and Descanso Gardens (no entry) is 5 miles round trip. More options available.
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Easy to moderate.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: City of La Canada Flintridge; tel. (818) 790-8880
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cc45d57a6f9b4a4befbb171a98e4bde8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-07-ca-48098-story.html | Syndicated ‘Frasier’ Episode Spoofing Dr. Laura Is Pulled | Syndicated ‘Frasier’ Episode Spoofing Dr. Laura Is Pulled
Paramount is suffering another public-relations headache regarding “Dr. Laura,” this time involving a fellow member of the studio’s television family, “Frasier,” with an episode of the sitcom that spoofed talk-show host Laura Schlessinger having been mysteriously yanked from syndication.
The episode in question first aired on NBC in April 1999 and featured Christine Baranski as a spiteful radio host named Dr. Nora who preached morals, had a terrible relationship with her mother and clashed with the program’s namesake, played by Kelsey Grammer.
Schlessinger criticized “Frasier” on her syndicated radio program in March, saying it was unfair to satirize her mother, who is not a public figure. The producers of “Frasier” had joined in a rally outside Paramount urging the studio not to provide Schlessinger a forum in television, based on comments made by the host that gay-rights activists deemed homophobic and anti-gay.
The Dr. Nora episode--for which both Baranski and Piper Laurie received Emmy nominations--played in syndication last December but has since disappeared, coinciding with the window in which Paramount was preparing to launch “Dr. Laura” in September. By contrast, the episodes immediately preceding and following it have each been repeated three times this year.
“Obviously, someone has done this,” said “Frasier” co-creator David Lee. “This is not accidental.”
Both “Dr. Laura,” which airs locally on KCBS-TV at 3 p.m. weekdays, and reruns of “Frasier” are distributed through Paramount’s syndication unit. The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which has been campaigning against Schlessinger’s program, called the chain of events “suspicious.”
Keven Bellows, a spokeswoman for Schlessinger, said emphatically that the host had nothing to do with the episode being pulled. “It’s totally ridiculous. . . . You’d have to be nuts to do that,” she said. "[And] it’s certainly not true that Laura had anything to do with it.”
Sources within Paramount have speculated that syndication executives may have decided on their own not to run the episode for fear of offending Schlessinger. A spokesman for the studio’s television division said Paramount “received no request from Dr. Laura” not to air the episode but declined to comment on its absence, saying only that the program would be broadcast when its next rerun cycle comes up in February.
“Frasier’s” Lee suggested that studio officials--having defended their decision to go forward with Schlessinger’s show on 1st Amendment grounds--appeared hypocritical. “If you’re going to lecture me about freedom of speech, be consistent about it,” he said.
“I find it curious that Paramount would yank the Dr. Nora episode, because this is the only Dr. Laura show Paramount has done that people want to watch,” added Joe Keenan, the former “Frasier” producer who wrote the episode.
Ratings for “Dr. Laura” have been low, a trend that has plagued virtually all daytime series introduced this season. The current month--a rating sweeps period--could be crucial for new programs, with the threat TV stations may move shows with subpar ratings into less desirable time slots.
Facing an orchestrated pressure campaign, more than 90 sponsors across the country have dropped ads on “Dr. Laura,” forcing Paramount to sell time at reduced rates. The studio has expressed confidence in the program but has also undertaken creative revisions seeking to make its format more similar to Schlessinger’s radio show.
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83010d1b68b82bfad92c06f923e6aee7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-07-mn-48401-story.html | Last Billionaire Boys Club Case Dismissed; Star Witness Uncooperative | Last Billionaire Boys Club Case Dismissed; Star Witness Uncooperative
A San Mateo County judge on Monday dismissed the remaining Billionaire Boys Club case after the state’s star witness, who is in the witness protection program, declined to provide defense attorneys his new identity and address.
Superior Court Judge Carl Holm said the defendant, Reza Eslaminia, could not adequately cross-examine a witness whose new identity is unknown.
Eslaminia and four others were accused of kidnapping Eslaminia’s father, Hedayat Eslaminia, a high-ranking Iranian official, in an alleged extortion plot. Authorities said he was kidnapped from his Belmont apartment and suffocated in a locked trunk while being driven to Southern California in 1984.
Two years ago, a federal judge overturned the murder and kidnapping convictions of Reza Eslaminia and Arben “Ben” Dosti. Prosecutors fought successfully to retry the pair. Dosti pleaded guilty in August to reduced charges and was freed from prison.
The Billionaire Boys Club consisted mostly of wealthy young Southern Californians who attempted a variety of get-rich-quick schemes that failed. Reza Eslaminia insisted that he did not participate in his father’s kidnapping and had no motive for wishing him dead, because he knew that his father’s once substantial fortune was gone.
There were five defendants in the case. Dean Karny, the witness who declined to give his new identity, received immunity in exchange for his testimony.
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605b662ee9fe90349e615212840e60a3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-11-mn-50415-story.html | White Supremacist, 3 Followers Charged With Harassing 4 Officials | White Supremacist, 3 Followers Charged With Harassing 4 Officials
A 25-year-old man who has used the Internet to become a rising star in the national white supremacist movement has been indicted along with three followers on charges of harassing a Jewish congressman, a Latino mayor and two other officials, federal prosecutors announced Friday.
“We have zero tolerance for these kinds of cowardly acts,” said U.S. Atty. Gregory Vega.
Alexander James Curtis is charged as the reputed ringleader of a group that between 1997 and 1999 allegedly smeared anti-Semitic graffiti on two San Diego synagogues and left graffiti, stickers and leaflets outside the offices of Rep. Bob Filner (D-San Diego); Art Madrid, mayor of the suburb of La Mesa; local Anti-Defamation League leader Morris Casuto; and Clara Harris, former director of the Heartland Human Relations and Fair Housing Assn.
Indicted with Curtis were three men who met him through his extensive Web sites dedicated to preaching racial superiority and violence: Michael Brian DaSilva, 21; Robert Nicol Morehouse, 53; and Kevin Christopher Holland, 22.
The four defendants are charged with violating federal civil rights and hate-crime laws that make it illegal to target someone for mistreatment on the basis of race, religion or national origin.
They are not charged with any violent acts, but during a two-year investigation by the FBI and San Diego Police Department, authorities overheard them plotting violence, officials said.
Morehouse and Holland have pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and cooperated with authorities in the indictment of Curtis and DaSilva. DaSilva is already serving a state sentence for possession of a concealed and loaded sawed-off shotgun.
Curtis was arrested Thursday in his bedroom at his parents’ home in suburban Lemon Grove. FBI agents said they seized racist literature, a framed picture of Adolf Hitler, racist leaflets, a semiautomatic pistol, a Confederate flag and a book written by Che Guevara. The materials were seized as evidence that Curtis has mounted a campaign of hate.
Curtis and DaSilva face four charges that could bring a maximum of 40 years in prison. Morehouse and Holland face a maximum 10 years when they are sentenced next year. No promises of leniency have been made to them, Vega said.
Among other acts, the four are charged with sticking the skin of a boa constrictor through the mail slot of Filner’s Chula Vista office. Some of the group’s racist stickers contained the phone number for Curtis’ telephone hotline.
Filner said the graffiti and leaflets had left his younger staff members particularly frightened. “You keep seeing swastikas, pictures of Hitler, slogans like ‘Jews Must Die'--people get scared because they know people have guns,” the congressman said.
The Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League have called Curtis the most radical of a new generation of hate leaders who have rejected the limitations of traditional groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the National Alliance and encouraged a much more violent racist underground.
With mainstream organizations infiltrated by law enforcement and plagued with civil penalties such as the $6.3-million judgment that bankrupted the Aryan Nations in September, Curtis has called for racial activists to move anonymously as “lone wolves” or to form small, anonymous revolutionary cells in the name of racial “leaderless resistance.”
Turning Curtis’ own slogan against him, authorities called their investigation Operation Lone Wolf.
Rocky Suhayda, chairman of the American Nazi Party, sent out an Internet appeal Friday for $5 legal aid donations to Curtis, whose father owns an engineering firm. “For all of you old fighters, he is one of the young leaders who will take our place when we are gone,” Suhayda said.
Internet Magazine Advocates Terrorism
Curtis publishes the monthly Nationalist Observer on the Internet and offers a weekly and daily telephone broadcast and a racist Internet magazine in which he advocates biological terrorism and regularly celebrates “lone wolves” such as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Buford Furrow, accused in the 1998 attack on a Jewish preschool in the San Fernando Valley.
“In the last 20 months we have witnessed the most prolific and vicious acts against Jews . . . in U.S. history,” Curtis proclaimed recently. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”
To fund his operation, Curtis has an extensive Internet mail-order catalog that features books, T-shirts, white power CDs and videos.
In 1997, he was arrested for distributing fliers that illegally featured police insignia. He was sentenced to three years’ probation, 100 hours of community service and 20 days of agricultural labor.
Tom Metzger of the Fallbrook-based White Aryan Resistance, one of Curtis’ longtime mentors, said the indictment reflects a growing federal campaign to suppress white supremacist political views.
“Alex Curtis is very highly respected throughout the country, and to go after him with relatively Mickey Mouse charges is just going to infuriate more of the people who are in our camp,” he said.
William Gore, head of the San Diego FBI office, said he is not worried about a backlash.
“If followers of Alex Curtis see him as a martyr, so be it,” Gore said. “I feel better having him off the street.”
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10de6af768f7370f90528d9917ade081 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-12-wp-50659-story.html | Documentary Maker Follows His Own Path in Celebrating History | Documentary Maker Follows His Own Path in Celebrating History
In the early 1970s, a Hampshire College student named Ken Burns decided against a Hollywood film career. He wanted to be a time traveler, visiting yesteryear America, meeting its legendary heroes and celebrating his discoveries in documentaries.
“I’m asking ‘Who are we?’ Who am I?’ ” Burns said. “It’s an obvious question for any artist. For me, it’s intensely personal and psychological.”
There was a second reason for Burns’ decision: control of his productions, something Hollywood wouldn’t permit. “I’m in the enviable position of telling you that if my films are bad, it’s entirely my fault,” he said.
Burns chose this route, though it could have meant a future of poverty and anonymity. But something unexpected happened along the way: America fell in love with Burns’ artistic recountings of history.
Burns, who’d taken his last formal American history class in 11th grade, turned such subjects as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty and the Shakers into cinematic opera through his masterful reworking of the documentary form.
However, it wasn’t until the 1990 airing of his 11-hour PBS series, “The Civil War"--the most-watched show on public television, and the first documentary to gross more than $100 million--that his destiny changed.
Burns, 47, was far from an overnight success. After graduating, he took any cinematography work offered him. He struggled for day wages, while shooting for the BBC and Italian television. And though his first documentaries were roundly praised, they brought him little income.
Undeterred, he kept plugging. In the mid-1980s, he selected the Civil War as the subject of his next documentary subject.
“People had told him not to do it [“The Civil War”], that it was foolish,” said Gary Edgerton, a professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., who’s writing an analysis of Burns’ works for St. Martin’s Press tentatively titled “Ken Burns’ America.” “They said it was far too monumental a subject for one person to handle.”
“Word was, he was eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sleeping on the floor,” said Rozanne Weissman, who was with Corp. for Public Broadcasting when Burns approached the organization for funding. Its committee members turned him down, Weissman said.
“They were saying, ‘Who is ever going to watch a series that is so long about the Civil War, where you’re only showing still photos and panning a camera?’ ”
Burns persisted, with an almost evangelistic resolve. He continued searching for funds, working 15-hour days, and, though money was scarce, turning down offers to direct commercials that might have earned him up to $10,000 per day.
He took 5 1/2 years to finish “The Civil War,” a time span longer than the war itself. He sifted through 16,000 old photographs, shot 150 hours of film, edited the material down to 11 hours, and added period music and off-camera narration.
Burns abhors dramatic reenactments. He said they didn’t do the dead justice. Instead, he used cinematography to convey action and emotion. He’d film a now-peaceful battlefield site at the precise time of day when a skirmish occurred, pan the acreage, zoom in for close-ups, and let his camera gallop and lurch over terrain. He’d then cut to photographic stills of the bloody aftermath. This way, he let the dead tell their own tales.
“Various filmmakers had used these techniques before, but he put them together in a form distinctly his own,” Edgerton said.
*
Burns learned much of his documentary methodology at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., under the tutelage of two teachers, renowned photographer Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mayes. Liebling, whose jarringly beautiful black-and-white photographs express social realism themes, taught Burns and his peers to subtly allow their subjects to state their own meaning and eloquence. Mayes amplified this skill.
“I taught how to see, how to pay attention to things in the world, how to look with a camera,” Mayes said. “He was encouraged by us to be inventive, not to work from a pre-planned script but to [innovate] as he went along.”
Burns was an apt pupil. His approach to documentaries can only be described as “organic.” He visits his subjects as a wide-eyed initiate, believing that his lack of prior knowledge is an asset; he’ll learn along with his audiences. Bucking documentary traditions, he first selects musical pieces before scripting and shooting the projects.
“I might take 50 different tunes I liked, go into the studio and play each tune 20 or 30 different ways, until I found what I wanted,” he said. “Then I’d begin writing and editing to the music, conforming scenes to the music’s emotional power.”
As he proceeds, he lets his scripts and narratives evolve with his discoveries.
“We ask questions without any idea where we’re going in the script,” Burns said, conceding that his approach is more time-consuming and expensive than the more traditionally prescriptive method of documentary-making. “At the darkest moments of editing, we have to trust.”
Dayton Duncan, who describes himself as Burns’ friend, neighbor and co-worker, has written, produced and consulted for several Burns projects. “To me, his greatest attribute is his boundless enthusiasm, which I think is infectious. It’s especially helpful, because our process is a slow one. It’s possible to get worn down by the grind, the constant revisions. But he always brings this energy and enthusiasm to every project that reminds us, in the end, it will be worthwhile.”
Burns’ professional obsession with the past and his quest to resurrect and reexamine it have personal roots, he said. Burns’ mother died of cancer when he was 11. Ten years ago, Burns mentioned to an acquaintance that he still lacked closure on her death.
“And he said, ‘Ken, look what you do for a living--you wake the dead. Who do you think you’re trying to wake up?’ ” Burns recalled. “It hit me like a ton of bricks. I suddenly realized I was keeping my mother alive.”
Though, metaphorically, Burns wakes the dead and allows them to retell their tales, he said they, too, stir him, change him and present him with gifts in the form of insights.
Burns’ headquarters, a 19th century home, office and editing building, is in Walpole, N.H., just 1 1/2 hours from his alma mater. Burns has said that, if his fortunes ever changed, he could continue to live simply in this village. Furnished in early-American style, his office and home are far from lavish. “We put everything on the screen,” Burns said.
Throughout the house are mementos of his “awakenings.” The apple trees outside his second-story office window were planted when Burns was working on a biography of Thomas Jefferson. A bust of Abraham Lincoln (from “The Civil War”) and a framed painting of Jackie Robinson (from “Baseball”) keep Burns company as he works.
*
Within Burns’ home are architectural drawings of the Brooklyn Bridge, a bag of baseballs and a photograph of collaborator Duncan and Burns in Lewis and Clark-style clothes (“Lewis and Clark”) posing by a fort, Duncan said. Against an antique bookcase leans “a considerable number” of awards and plaques, he added.
“He came here in 1979 to escape the tyranny of New York and L.A., where everything is so expensive, and things have to be done quickly,” Duncan said. “He’s taught me that the greatest gift you can give a project is time. It gives you the opportunity to change your mind, to do things differently.”
While digging up, examining and visually singing America’s stories, Burns discovered a common theme flowing throughout them: race or, as Burns defines it, “the improbable dance that black people and white people have been doing with each other.”
“How can we marginalize the African American experience” when it is so fundamental to our American heritage? he asked. “Frankly, I don’t see how you can be interested in American history, but not race.”
This issue will resonate heavily in Burns’ upcoming series, “Jazz,” which will air on PBS in January. The project has taken him six years to complete.
*
Jazz, which Burns calls “America’s music,” had its beginnings in the New Orleans African American community and was nurtured by such greats as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. Burns started out with little familiarity of the music: He admitted to having only two jazz records in his considerable music collection. Now it’s all he listens to.
Next year, Burns, the divorced father of two girls, may take a sabbatical, but he’s got other projects on the drawing board: a biography of Mark Twain (nearly completed); a series on America’s national parks; and a documentary tentatively titled “Horatio’s Drive,” about the first automobile trip across the country.
Burns remains humble despite his successes. He once said, “Celebrity is like chocolate cake. It’s good tasting but if you eat too much, you get sick.”
A perennial student, he expresses gratitude for the lessons he learns from each of his productions, and for the inspiration he receives from the great men and women of the past. His relationships with them are, in a way, reciprocal.
In Burns’ office, he has placed photographs of Louis Armstrong, whom he calls “the most important person in 20th century music,” near Lincoln’s bust and Jackie Robinson’s portrait. He spoke animatedly about Armstrong, a virtuoso and innovator who turned jazz into a soloist’s art, inspiring legions of musicians and singers after him. Burns offered anecdotes about Armstrong’s generosity, kindness, wisdom and love for people. There was awe in his voice.
“He’s changed me--yes, I’ve been changed,” Burns said. “I can tell you with absolute sincerity that my anxiety about my own mortality has been tempered. You see, I believe that, if I’m good, I might hear Armstrong blow with Gabriel.”
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fadc5f7c132a5c0f6bd06df5457d4a0a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-14-ca-51289-story.html | Compellingly Sold by the Gross | Compellingly Sold by the Gross
Peering into the world according to artist Paul McCarthy, a viewer is likely to conclude that Santa’s bright red nose is caused less by Jack Frost than by Jack Daniel’s; that Heidi’s gruff but kindly grandfather gets rather too kindly during those cold nights in the Swiss Alps; and that poor old Geppetto suffered from more than simple loneliness when he made the peculiar decision to whittle a surrogate son from a block of wood. McCarthy’s fairy tales are--well, grim.
Which is, of course, the way all good fairy tales were before the Age of Disney. The propensity of mass culture to sweeten the psychologically disturbing pie for the purpose of maximizing audience share does not apply to art, whether folk or fine. McCarthy’s art takes full advantage of the difference.
At its best, the result is work that can leave you staring slack-jawed, skittering emotionally between embarrassment and wonder, pathos and nausea, hilarity and despair. The uncanny experience is like being smashed in the solar plexus by what seems to be nothing but an adolescent dirty joke.
But it’s much more than that. At the Museum of Contemporary Art’s warehouse space in Little Tokyo, an engrossing survey of McCarthy’s drawings, performances, sculptures, videos and installations spanning the past 32 years opened Sunday. It’s a terrific show, not to be missed. Organized by New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art, where it travels in February, and accompanied by an excellent catalog, the survey goes a long way toward elucidating an important body of work produced in Los Angeles that so far has been known only erratically.
The MOCA show is built around six elaborate recent installations that incorporate video and mechanical props, beginning with the demented 1991 cooking demonstration “Bossy Burger” and including the harrowing tableau of paradise defiled, “The Garden,” which finally catapulted McCarthy to international celebrity when it was shown in MOCA’s 1992 extravaganza, “Helter Skelter.”
Before the past decade, however, most of McCarthy’s memorable work took the ephemeral form of performance art. (He also made photographs and films.) The performance work is known today through photographs, videotapes, artifacts and other documentation. Some two dozen cogent examples have been brought together in the show, and they demonstrate a path of continuity in McCarthy’s art. The track is narrow but deep, and the artist has forged a shifting array of consistently inventive means with which to probe it.
*
The earliest work is a violently creepy sculptural object, which features a taxidermy squirrel jammed into a hole in a battered mannequin’s head. (The object was left over from a 1967 performance in Salt Lake City, McCarthy’s birthplace.) Resting on its side, the sculpture is displayed on a pedestal composed of a stained and soiled cardboard box. It elicits a bizarre recollection of the classic sculptures of sleeping heads by Brancusi, elegantly positioned on refined blocks of carved stone. Here, though, the peaceful muse of Eros has been shattered by unspeakable nightmares.
Trained as a painter, McCarthy entered a 1970s art scene in which painting was widely considered to be on the wane. Painting represented orthodoxy and convention. After McCarthy moved to L.A., home of a newly emerging art world where the tradition of painting was not strong, he focused on performance art.
Yet, the photographs and videos in the exhibition show that painting remained central to McCarthy’s performance work. In one, he used his face, head and shoulders as a “brush” with which to paint a smeared line around the interior walls of a ramshackle room. In another, he lay on his stomach on the floor, pushing a paint can with his head and dragging his body through the line of white paint that sloshed out. A third shows him violently whipping a wall with a heavy paint-soaked blanket, while in a fourth he does the same to big glass windows.
These performances explode conventions of American Abstract Expressionism, from the so-called action painting of Jackson Pollock to the fragmented color fields of Barnett Newman. A visceral rawness marks McCarthy’s re-imagined versions. The means he employed were unusual, but the ambitions are familiar. He was laboring to reestablish connections to the roiling energy of primitive aims, which artists from Goya to Guston had directed to the culturally higher impulse of painting.
This isn’t Pollock gracefully dripping streams of paint onto glass as he did for a famous film by Hans Namuth, but a wild assault on big windowpanes--which could spell disaster. As shown in a photograph of another work, when McCarthy closed the vertical gap between a pair of swinging doors using blobs of cotton held in place by strips of tape, it’s as if the visual rupture formed by the stripe down a Newman “zip” painting had been made three-dimensional, then bandaged in a hospital emergency room.
Other artists in Europe and Japan were also responding to Abstract Expressionism in unusual ways, but McCarthy’s work seems distinctly American. It may have to do with the American phenomenon of mass culture. Living and working in Los Angeles, he was at ground zero for that.
McCarthy’s performances became steadily more elaborate and baroque, while the introduction of costumes, masks, props and sets gave them the crazed aura of local public access TV shows. Paint was replaced by ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise and other gooey foodstuffs, which were used in scatological rituals of consumption and disgorging. McCarthy’s own body became the canvas.
The primitive psychodramas that tear at human existence don’t disappear because of pristine technological progress; they’re just sublimated in a different way, according to the new characteristics of mass culture. McCarthy unravels the thin veneer of today’s brand of socialized conformity to put those awful impulses on startling display.
“Bossy Burger” was the breakout work. On a fragment of stage set salvaged from the popular television sitcom “Family Affair,” he videotaped a private performance in which, wearing a white apron and toque and a rubber mask of Alfred E. Neuman, Mad magazine’s fictional hero of disaffected adolescence, he conducted a cooking demonstration that quickly degenerated into unrestrained chaos, violence and edible lust. For exhibition, the theatrically lit stage set is displayed strewn with the vile residue of the deranged event, and it looks like the scene of an unspeakable crime. Over to one side, a video monitor replays the past action, which is funny, pathetic, familiar and horrible--and almost inexplicably moving.
That’s what’s so disconcerting about McCarthy’s best installations. Swift responses of “Ew, gross!” are surreptitiously overtaken by quiet empathy.
It doesn’t always work. His 1994 “Tomato Head” sculptures, in which a human-size variation on the children’s toy Mr. Potato Head stands in for the absent performer, feel chilly and remote.
The big dolls and their sleek plug-in accessories aren’t as acutely observed as the mannequins of gruesomely narcissistic fathers and sons in “The Garden,” which is constructed on a scavenged set of huge redwood trees from the old TV series “Bonanza,” and in “Cultural Gothic,” with its post-Rauschenberg stuffed goat. In these indelible sculptures, monstrously disfigured urges of the male libido are rendered with the precision of a cuckoo clock.
The show could benefit from additional drawings, which McCarthy often scribbles with black marker pens. The strongest are characterized by a blunt, fragmented energy that eventually frustrates coherence. You strain to see, then find odd relief in not being able to.
But these are small complaints in an important show that’s certainly welcome. McCarthy’s art is not for children, nor for adults who choose to act like children. Frequently it offends, but never in a shallow or cavalier way. One hallmark of maturity is the ability to take offense. McCarthy’s poignant art represents a necessary, mature willingness to recognize the difference between human truth and moral vanity.
* MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., (213) 626-6222, through Jan. 21. Closed Mondays.
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d4793bfe3f914a6099350f5cc168ecf5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-17-ca-53040-story.html | Arnold Lands in a Double Bind | Arnold Lands in a Double Bind
Hollywood, which has been cloning action-adventure movies for years, has gotten around to making an action-adventure movie about cloning. It’s called “The 6th Day,” and whom does it star? Arnold Schwarzenegger. Twice.
Even before computers improved the process in films like the Michael Keaton-starring “Multiplicity,” actors sharing the screen with themselves was not a new phenomenon. Still, it’s an arresting sensation, something that seems almost contrary to nature, to see Schwarzenegger playing against Schwarzenegger.
For the man is so sui generis, so preeminently himself, that seeing him twice is like going to Yellowstone National Park and finding a pair of Old Faithfuls sharing the same plot of land. Even the idea of Schwarzenegger playing Danny De Vito’s identical twin in “Twins” was not half so strange.
Aesthetic considerations aside, of all the guys to clone without his knowledge, don’t the villains know better than to pick on Our Arnold? Aren’t they familiar with the track record, couldn’t they predict that the closest he’s going to get to a serious wound is a nick while shaving? And once you’ve gotten the big guy riled, you might as well have challenged John Wayne to a barroom brawl. Or Shane to a gunfight.
In all fairness to the villains, Schwarzenegger’s Adam Gibson does seem like quite the family man, down to his loving wife (Wendy Crewson) and adoring daughter. And though “The 6th Day’s” press notes describe Adam as a “decorated fighter pilot in what was known as the Rainforest War,” none of that has made it into the film, so how were the bad guys to know how potentially lethal a character he was?
In a further attempt to distance Adam’s character from Arnold’s Terminator image, “The 6th Day” (written by first-timers Cormac Wibberley & Marianne Wibberley and directed by the veteran Roger Spottiswoode) opens with our hero celebrating a birthday and worriedly scanning his face for wrinkles. Not to worry, even a year older he’s still capable of making a muscle that could incapacitate a horse.
Since “The 6th Day” is eager to have a “ripped from today’s headlines” feeling, it puts headlines about the cloning of Dolly the sheep and the mapping of human DNA right up on the screen. The film is set in the near future, where things look pretty much, but not totally, the same.
*
It’s a world where your refrigerator automatically keeps track of your family’s milk needs, and where Adam’s pal Hank (Michael Rapaport) enjoys the favors of a virtual girlfriend. And it’s a world where a company called RePet is taking animal cloning to new levels.
With advertising slogans like “cloning is love” and “where love means no surprises,” RePet will duplicate your recently deceased companion and do such a good job of it that even the replacement animals have no idea they are not the real thing.
An old-fashioned kind of guy, Adam Gibson wants nothing to do with any of this. He doesn’t even want to give his daughter a super-realistic doll called the Sim-Pal Cindy that never shuts up (an idea that came from writer John Sayles). Death, he says, is part of the natural process of life, and it ought to stay that way.
Michael Drucker of Replacement Technologies (an effective Tony Goldwyn), the world’s most powerful human, sees things differently. Though human cloning is illegal, he’s been collaborating with scientist Griffin Weir (an underused Robert Duvall) to make it happen, and let’s just say they’ve made a lot of progress. Just how much progress becomes clear to Adam when he comes home one night and finds what looks suspiciously like a clone version of himself getting all the presents at what had been billed as his own birthday party.
Adam is, not surprisingly, perplexed by this turn of events. “I know it sounds crazy,” he tells a disbelieving police officer. “I can’t hardly believe it myself.” Once the villains realize that Adam knows what they’ve been up to, they think it’ll be easy to eliminate him. Obviously, these guys have not been to the movies much the past 20 years.
One of “The 6th Day’s” devices is the notion that its awfully hard to tell a clone from the original person, and though this leads to some wry humor (“Doesn’t anyone stay dead anymore,” Adam asks plaintively at one point), it’s also confusing and saps our interest. Given how generic everything else about “The 6th Day” is, from its standard-issue action to its halfhearted dialogue and acting, that’s one situation even two Schwarzeneggers aren’t enough to solve.
* MPAA rating: PG-13, for strong action violence, brief strong language and some sensuality. Times guidelines: a considerable amount of traditional action-movie violence.
‘The 6th Day’
Arnold Schwarzenegger: Adam Gibson
Tony Goldwyn: Drucker
Michael Rapaport: Hank
Michael Rooker: Marshall
A Phoenix Pictures presentation, released by Columbia Pictures. Director Roger Spottiswoode. Producers Mike Medavoy, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jon Davison. Executive producers Daniel Petrie Jr., David Coatsworth. Screenplay by Cormac Wibberley & Marianne Wibberley. Cinematographer Pierre Mignot. Editors Mark Conte, Dominique Fortin, Michel Arcand. Costume designer Trish Keating. Music Trevor Rabin. Production designers James Bissell, John Willett. Art directors Patrick Banister, Chris Burian-Mohr, Doug Hardwick. Set decorator Peter Lando. Running time: 2 hours, 4 minutes.
In general release.
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d9ced372c70a8c63801d3edde792837c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-17-fi-53201-story.html | Il Fornaio Chain Acquired in $81.4-Million Cash Deal | Il Fornaio Chain Acquired in $81.4-Million Cash Deal
Connecticut investment firm Bruckmann, Rosser, Sherrill & Co. added another California restaurant chain to its portfolio Thursday, agreeing to buy Il Fornaio (America) Corp. for about $81.4 million.
Fornaio shareholders will receive $14 a share in cash for each share they hold, Chief Financial Officer Peter Hausback. After the transaction is completed, some executives and stockholders will retain a significant stake in the company, which is to be taken private.
The Corte Madera, Calif.-based company operates 24 Italian restaurants with a retail bakery in each store, including several in Southern California. It also has three wholesale bakeries that sell breads and pastries to grocery stores, cafes, restaurants and hotels.
Greenwich, Conn.-based Bruckmann, Rosser, Sherrill holds a controlling stake in Los Angeles-based California Pizza Kitchen Inc., the Mexican restaurant chains Acapulco and El Torito and the Au Bon Pain Co. bakery cafe chain.
Il Fornaio will continue to be headquartered in Corte Madera, and will operate as a private company. The current Il Fornaio management team is expected to remain in place, according to Il Fornaio President and Chief Executive Mike Hislop.
Shares of Il Fornaio rose $3.38, or 36%, to close at $12.69 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading.
Key franchises in the so-called casual-dining category of the restaurant market have become popular with investors as the number of Americans eating out continues to grow.
The percentage of Americans who have visited a casual-dining establishment three or more times in a month climbed from 61% in the first half of 1998 to 63.3% in the first half of this year, according to a study of 11 urban markets nationwide by Bob Sandelman, a Villa Park restaurant consultant. The average spending per person during that same period rose 4.6% to $12.39.
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ec7e9353a4f654777ea5c20b2265e25e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-19-ca-54062-story.html | Haunted by Such Human Tales | Haunted by Such Human Tales
“ ‘Kwaidan’ is a project I’ve wanted to do for 20 years,” theater director Ping Chong says of the famous collection of traditional Japanese ghost stories, four of which were made into the 1964 film “Kwaidan.” “I saw the film, then I read the book.”
He was drawn to the stories, he has said, “because of the profoundly human themes embodied in them: the longing for redemption, the inability to surrender pain and the loss of the past, love lost and regained, the consequences of time wrought upon human existence.”
In 1988, he presented one story, “The Woman of the Snow,” as part of a theatrical anthology, but he continued to dream of an entire work based on the material. In the mid-1990s, Chong was invited by Atlanta’s Center for Puppetry Arts to create a program, and he knew immediately what he would do--"Kwaidan.”
It took some five years for him and his production company, Ping Chong & Company, to pull together the funding. After working with the center for eight months, the production premiered in Atlanta in June 1998. Since then, the show has been performed to sold-out houses from New York to London, as well as Japan. “Kwaidan” comes to UCLA’s Freud Playhouse Nov. 30-Dec. 3.
Chong, who this year received an Obie award--his second--for sustained achievement, has created some 50 productions, a number exploring East-West themes, including “Deshima” in 1990, “Chinoiserie” in 1995 and “After Sorrow” in 1998. But “Kwaidan” is his first full-length production featuring puppetry.
Sitting in a quiet coffee shop near Chinatown in New York City, the intense, wiry director recalls the process of creating “Kwaidan,” which the New York Times praised for “the inventiveness of the storytelling” and “the extravagant art and artfulness of its set.”
“You have to storyboard the whole thing,” he explains. “You have to design the scale of the puppets. Everything is pre-planned except the gestural language of the puppets because each puppet has limitations and strengths, which you don’t know until you have them.”
*
Experts at the Center for Puppetry Arts, led by artistic director Jon Ludwig, figured out what kinds of puppets to use and how to construct them. (The “Kwaidan” puppets are operated by sticks from below.)
Recognizing the need for some cultural authenticity, Chong brought in a Japanese designer, Mitsuru Ishii. “I know Japanese are very picky about accuracy,” he says. “I didn’t do ‘Deshima’ with Japanese consultants, so when we brought it to Japan, there were some criticisms--costumes and stuff like that. I think it’s a good idea when you’re dealing with a culture that’s not yours that you do bring some consultant on because you can be making all kinds of ridiculous mistakes otherwise.”
At the same time, he makes it clear that he did not look to Japanese traditions of theater, whether bunraku or Kabuki, for his staging. In fact, he introduced slightly different techniques to tell each story, pulling out almost every available theatrical ploy to engage the audience--varying scales of puppets, unusual angles of view, light projection, and haunting sound effects.
*
Born in Toronto and raised not far from New York’s Chinatown, Chong graduated in 1969 from the School of Visual Arts in New York with a film degree. But he didn’t go into film, he says, because “there were no Chinese filmmakers in ’69, so back then it would have been a major long shot to do that. It’s a very aggressive business by and large--I was 24 when I graduated, and I didn’t have the confidence to do that.”
So, Chong says, “I decided to take dance, just to give myself some time to figure what I wanted to do next.” He took lessons from Meredith Monk, who eventually invited him to join her workshop. A year later, he was a member of her dance company.
“Back in those days, dance was more experimental, and they were looking for people who were natural movers--who were not technique-based people, so it was somewhere between performance and dance. That’s how it all began for me.”
Chong was with the company from 1972 to 1978, gradually becoming a collaborator as well as a performer. Eventually, he began to produce his own theatrical pieces--a combination of dance and drama. His early works tended to be abstract and even nonlinear (“A.M./A.M.--The Articulated Man” and “Angels of Swedenborg”). But in 1990, he began to produce more historically based works, incorporating real people and events, resulting in “Deshima.” During the centuries when Japan was closed to the West, Deshima was the island where the Japanese permitted early Dutch traders and missionaries to land. In an overarching way, “Deshima” was a chance for Chong to address issues of East-West relationships and identities.
Moving into puppetry felt natural, he says. He had used puppets in his early works, in the 1970s, though not in the ‘80s or ‘90s. “My background is as a visual artist,” he says, “and as a visual artist, you’re used to controlling everything. So in that sense, making ‘Kwaidan’ is closer to being back to my roots as being a visual artist.”
“Jikininki"--"Kwaidan’s” first section, about a possessed Buddhist priest--opens on three window-like panels. Across them, a large black crow flies over a mountain landscape, and a traveler who picks his way along a path grows larger by the time he reaches a wayside hut in the right panel. By changing the scale of the puppet, Chong transits from what is the equivalent of a long shot in film to a medium shot. Later, a ghost is represented by a parabolic play of light. Such cinematic devices are used throughout the pieces, innovations he credits mostly to his film training.
“Nobody had done that in puppetry before,” he says of a couple of scenes shown from the top down--an overhead shot, so to speak. “That’s where it’s an advantage to bring in an artist into a field that is not his field--some of the most interesting theater people are people who didn’t come from theater, like myself. I brought a lot of my film background to use.”
*
In another story, “Miminashi Hoichi,” the blind priest Hoichi is played by a person, the other characters played by puppets, while a demon is portrayed by a fierce pair of eyes glowing in the background. Hoichi has been summoned by the demon to play for an unknown audience, a well-behaved and most appreciative audience that wants him to sing of the epic and tragic battle between two rival clans. However, this audience turns out to be one from the nether world.
While “Jikininki” and “Miminashi Hoichi” provided enough material for a good staging, the third, “O-Tei,” was only two pages in the original, so Chong had to expand it. Here, Chosei’s beloved is dying of consumption, and at her deathbed, she promises that they will meet again, 15 or 16 years hence. To move from a traditional Japan to a modern one, a sometimes poignant, sometimes hilarious montage is flashed onto three circular screens. An old-fashioned radio becomes a television, a tray of sushi becomes a hamburger, a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, and an infant’s hand becomes a wrinkled one.
“Of course it was a lot of fun doing that,” the director says with a smile. After the montage, we find ourselves in a noisy station where an older Chosei boards a super-speedy bullet train. At his destination, he goes into a McDonald’s--the director admits that time lapse has taken some artistic license here--where he finally finds his long-lost love.
“The original story didn’t move to the present,” Chong says. “I was interested in doing that because the first two stories set up a Japan that we have an image of, a stereotype of, when in fact the Japan of today is not that way at all, so it really is a comment about the world as well, the changing world.”
*
“KWAIDAN: Three Japanese Ghost Stories,” UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, Westwood. Dates: Opens Nov. 30. Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends Dec. 3. Price: $40. Phone: (310) 825-2101.
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2db9a131e3a27eaed7bde9d1540eeb28 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-22-mn-55663-story.html | Farm Workers Union Ends 16-Year Boycott of Grapes | Farm Workers Union Ends 16-Year Boycott of Grapes
“No Grapes!"--a spirited rallying cry of the labor movement and the political left for much of the last four decades--officially receded into history Tuesday as the United Farm Workers of America declared an end to its protracted boycott of California table grapes.
The announcement by UFW President Arturo S. Rodriguez makes official what had already become a fait accompli; the union and even its loyal followers had mostly lost interest in the sanction against the state’s grape growers.
Rodriguez said he ended the UFW’s third grape boycott, which began 16 years ago, because of a recent string of farm worker victories that included the elimination of many of the pesticides the embargo had targeted.
“Some goals of that boycott have already been met,” Rodriguez said in a letter to a farm worker support group. “Cesar Chavez’s crusade to eliminate use of five of the most toxic chemicals plaguing farm workers and their families has been largely successful.
“It is not fair to ask our supporters to honor a boycott,” Rodriguez said, “when the union must devote all of its present resources toward organizing and negotiating contracts.”
Farm industry leaders welcomed the announcement, but said they believe that the union’s move amounts to a concession that the boycott has failed to hurt the ever-expanding table grape business.
“The bottom line is that it never worked. It wasn’t effective,” said Bob Krauter, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation. “The union just had to have something to say when they called it off.”
The boycott that ended this week was a pale imitation of two earlier union table grape sanctions, which galvanized farm workers and liberals as Chavez created the nation’s first viable agricultural union.
The first boycott began in Delano, Calif., in 1963, as the fledgling union attempted to pressure growers to sign union contracts. UFW activists traveled in caravans to cities across America. They picketed in front of supermarkets, raising consciousness about farm workers and becoming a favorite cause for college activists. Chavez called off that first boycott in 1970, with the union in triumph and contracts in place with the state’s largest grape growers.
But three years later, the boycott began again, this time with the UFW on the defensive after losing most of its labor agreements to the Teamsters Union, which signed sweetheart deals with growers.
The second grape boycott overlapped with the union’s call for consumers to shun two other nonunion products--lettuce and Gallo wines. Bumper stickers reading “No Grapes” (or, in Spanish, “No Uvas”), or criticizing lettuce growers or the giant winemaker seemed like a standard issue for many progressive activists.
Again, a small army of activists traveled across the country to promote the boycotts. One survey indicated that as many as 17 million Americans weren’t buying grapes, union officials said.
In 1977, Chavez removed the sanctions against grapes, lettuce and Gallo wines, again in apparent triumph, after the passage of a California farm labor law that was considered the strongest in the nation.
It was in 1984 that the UFW leadership launched the third and longest grape boycott, one that never had the focus or public support of its predecessors. The union shifted the target of the strike--first urging Gov. George Deukmejian to improve enforcement of the farm labor law, then demanding more contracts with grape growers and, finally, concentrating on the pesticide issue.
At age 61 Chavez conducted his longest public fast--the 36-day “Fast for Life"--and continued to press the boycott until his death five years later in 1993.
The third boycott initially was promoted in UFW mailers to millions of households, but it never evoked the door-to-door spirit of its predecessors. Over the years, the union devoted progressively less attention to the boycott. Even some activists weren’t sure if the ban on grapes remained in place.
“One boycott is on and the other is off. It’s constantly shifting,” said Phil Martin, a professor of agricultural economics at UC Davis. “It becomes too complicated for the average person to figure out.”
Nonetheless, union leader Rodriguez said that three pesticides that most concerned Chavez--Dinoseb, parathion and Phosdrin--are no longer used in the fields. A fourth pesticide, methyl bromide, is to be phased out and a fifth, Captan, is under much greater restriction.
Those developments and the signing of a string of union contracts in recent years were reason enough to drop the boycott and focus attention on other issues, said Rodriguez, in what the union called “a message timed for Thanksgiving.”
But grape growers said their business appeared to be unaffected by the UFW’s long campaign. Production increased 40% to 660,000 tons over the last 16 years and the cash value of the California grape crop more than doubled to $382 million, industry officials said.
“It hasn’t hindered or restricted sales at all,” Krauter said.
The end of the grape boycott leaves in place just one UFW boycott--on mushrooms from the Pictsweet Mushroom Farm in Ventura. The UFW has called on consumers not to buy the mushrooms since last summer, part of the union’s long-running effort to win a contract for 300 Pictsweet workers. Since the boycott, both Vons and the Ralphs Grocery Co. have stopped carrying Pictsweet.
Proving that old habits die hard, some union activists said they would continue to shun table grapes.
“Table grape workers continue to suffer poverty pay, poor working conditions and mistreatment on the job,” said UFW spokesman Marc Grossman. “We look forward to the day where table grape workers too can enjoy the blessings of organized labor.”
*
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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6d8a84a131bfb47fd080355b87037627 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-23-ca-56130-story.html | Green Becomes Him | Green Becomes Him
According to director Ron Howard, the appearance of the young Grinch in “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas” was supposed to be just a sight gag--sort of a Mini-Me version of Jim Carrey as the mean green one. But that was before actor Josh Ryan Evans was cast in the part.
“As it turned out, he was able to create a character and generate a lot of heart for the story,” says Howard. “It was such a pleasant surprise. The days working with Jim were always amazing, but Josh was just delightful.”
The 3-foot, 2-inch Evans manages to elicit both laughter and sympathy as the little green furry boy who looks different from all of his schoolmates. It is their laughter and guffaws at his appearance and an ill-fated Christmas gift that make him turn his back on his hometown of Whoville and Christmas.
“I think that scene where everybody in class is laughing at him because he’s different is every kid’s nightmare, and that it happened to the young Grinch is kind of offbeat and entertaining,” says Howard. “But it’s sad and it rings true.”
The 18-year-old Evans--a rare disease halted his growth at age 2--is accompanied to a recent interview by his manager and his mother, Cheryl. It’s an unusual day off for the young actor, who has developed a cult following thanks to his funny, inventive performance as the living doll, Timmy, on NBC’s daytime drama “Passions.”
*
Though he’s the size of a small child, Evans has the appetite of a typical teenager. “He eats from the moment he’s up until the moment he goes to bed,” says his mother, as Evans starts devouring spicy chicken fingers, chicken drumsticks and a hearty supply of salsa at a quiet Sherman Oaks restaurant.
Cheryl Evans hands over her son’s latest business card, which features two tiny portraits of him: one as himself and one in his Grinch makeup. Underneath his name it says simply: “Young Grinch.”
“There were really no lines for the character,” says Evans. So he and Howard put their heads together in order to flesh out the mini-Grinch. “We made up lines on the fly,” says Howard, “like when he said: ‘The fires of love,’ or ‘What a lovely family heirloom.’ None of those things were in the script.”
Evans spent a day watching Carrey cavort as the Grinch, as well as dailies of the actor at work. “He did a great job of creating a connection there between the young Grinch and the grown-up Grinch,” says Howard.
It took 5 1/2 hours each day to apply Evans’ Grinch makeup and bodysuit--two hours more than for Carrey because everything was so small and intricate.
The shooting was difficult for Evans and everyone involved. “I have had heart surgery three times, so I know what it was like to have pins and needles stuck in you,” Evans admits.
“At one point we were there 16 hours and I was ready to pull him,” says his mother. “Then Ron said, ‘Action,’ and he just came to life.”
“If I’d been pulled from the film, I would never have forgiven myself,” Evans says, sipping on his soft drink. “I came close [to pulling myself]. I had two days left and I knew I had to go back. It was in the morning and, while getting up and putting on my clothes, I did not want to go. The night before I was yelling at my mom every minute she was saying something.”
Not only was he dreading the makeup application, he was feeling the pressure of matching Carrey’s performance, “doing what Ron wants and making the Dr. Seuss legacy valid in a new medium.”
Evans has been a regular on “Passions” since its premiere in July 1999. His character of Timmy was brought to life by a witch named Tabitha (Juliet Mills). The two, though, have a long history together. In fact, they were both burned at the stake at the Salem witch trials and Timmy even was a servant for Rasputin.
“I’m not evil, but some people are freaked out by a living doll,” Evans says, laughing. “I don’t play him as a doll. I play him as a person who can go into doll mode, a being who can turn into what looks like a doll.”
The Timmy-Tabitha story line has had a strong following since the show began, says the show’s executive producer, Lisa Hesser. “It seems to span all age ranges.”
The idea of casting Evans in “Passions,” says Hesser, came to her in the middle of the night. “We were talking about the character of Timmy and if it was going to be something animated or going to be a person. I was truly tossing and turning one night, and I flicked on TV and on E! there was a special behind-the-scenes of this movie [“Baby Geniuses”] Josh had done.”
The next day, she had her casting director get Evans for an interview. “He was so charming and wonderful, there wasn’t any question that he was the one who would play Timmy. Tabby and Timmy get to do and say all the things that most of us think but never say out loud.”
Born in Hayward in Northern California, Evans watched movies and television shows while recuperating from his childhood surgeries to replace a heart valve. (“It was all I could do besides reading books.”) Watching TV and movies helped him forget his pain. “I thought, if it’s all pretend, why can’t I do that?” he says.
By the time he was 12, he says, “I was feeling better. I realized my life was not going to be, per se, normal. I had already spent lots of time in the hospitals.”
“He said one day, ‘Mom, I’m never going to cure cancer, but I can help them forget they have it,’ ” recalls Cheryl Evans, who describes her son as a “life force.”
He had a business card made up stating “Josh Ryan Evans--Kid” and started giving them out to anybody who was an actor. “My mom is really into musicals, so I would take her to musicals and go backstage and meet the actors,” he says.
His persistence and ingenuity paid off. Within six months he got an agent and landed the part of the moon-walking baby on a Dryer’s Ice Cream commercial. His head, though, was replaced by that of a baby. “A lot of my jobs were head replacements in the very beginning,” he says.
His big break came as the child prodigy lawyer Oren Koolie on the first season of “Ally McBeal.”
“It’s so funny, I am a five-year overnight success,” says Evans. “Everybody said, ‘You hit it so big when you were on “Ally McBeal.” ’ I didn’t do anything for a year after ‘Ally McBeal,’ and I had to write David Kelley to get myself back on ‘Ally’ a second time because I thought the character should be on again.”
Evans, a high school senior, is tutored on the set of “Passions.” Evans doesn’t know if he wants to go to college but wouldn’t mind giving film school a whirl. “Ron Howard gave me an offer to intern because I asked him if I could observe him,” says Evans.
He adds: “I can’t think too far ahead. I am feeling better than I have ever felt. I love being an actor. I love my work. I love the payoff.”
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f210a5ddc88990c0337d0a74b0c29b0a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-26-ca-57234-story.html | The More Personas the Merrier | The More Personas the Merrier
If Ennio Marchetto ever stops making theater, he might consider a new career advising Beverly Hills plastic surgeons. After all, Hollywood celebs spend millions every year getting sculpted to look like new people. Marchetto achieves those make-overs in the blink of an eye, with cut-and-paste techniques you won’t find in any medical textbook.
Paper, scissors and over-the-top imagination are Marchetto’s artistic tools, which he uses to transform himself into instant cartoon celebrities. A few snips and tucks and-presto!--Marchetto becomes Barbra Streisand, complete with iconic cardboard proboscis. Stevie Wonder’s corn rows, Fidel Castro’s combat fatigues and Madonna’s notorious cone-shaped bra are among the outrageously inventive paper get-ups that Marchetto concocts in “Ennio: Starring Ennio Marchetto,” his one-man showcase of quick-change artistry that opens Thursday at the Geffen Playhouse.
During the 75-minute musical tour de force, the Spice Girls bloat into the Three Tenors, Celine Dion morphs into the Titanic, and Queen Elizabeth II turns into Freddie Mercury of Queen (get it?), belting out “I Want to Break Free.” Although Marchetto’s character lineup changes from show to show, the eye-popping speed of his switch-overs is unvarying.
*
On stage, the sturdily built Marchetto, 38, suggests a human pop-up book, or perhaps a piece of origami co-designed by Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. He also employs dance, mime, sight gags, and some expressive mugging and lip-syncing to animate his living gallery of celebrities and celebrated personages such as the pope and Mona Lisa.
“Actually, I really like to sing, but I’m very shy about singing. I prefer just to be a very good mime,” Marchetto says, sipping juice at a Sicilian restaurant near the Geffen before rehearsal recently. He was accompanied by Sosthen Hennekam, 34, the Netherlands-born former fashion designer who has been Marchetto’s co-director and designer since 1989. The two men live near each other in Venice, Italy, and often finish each other’s sentences.
“Sometimes we sound like an old couple, but we’re not,” Hennekam jokes.
“We are different in every way,” Marchetto agrees.
“I’m very Dutch and precise, and I want things organized,” Hennekam says.
“I’m not organized!” Marchetto responds.
“But I think that’s one of the things that’s good for the show,” Hennekam continues. “We see things in a different way, so there’s always a mix of interpretations and ideas. And we do fight a lot.”
“Less!” says Marchetto, getting in the final word.
“Shy” is hardly the term that leaps to mind watching Marchetto gyrate, swoon and eyeball-roll his way through a performance. Critics and peers from London to Tokyo have compared him to the great silent-film comedians and detected influences ranging from Matisse’s paper cutouts to the French master mime Jacques Le Coq.
But Marchetto cites his most significant influences as television, movies and ‘60s pop music, which transfixed him as a child. His performance style also is indebted to commedia dell’arte, the 16th and 17th century Italian brand of improvisational comedy with archetypal characters in stock scenarios.
“In the commedia dell’arte, the characters move a lot. You don’t need to understand [them], you can just understand the way they move,” Hennekam says.
Marchetto’s surreal costumes and operatically oversized gestures underscore his show’s view of stars as magical, dreamlike creatures, both funny and grotesque, endearing yet vaguely monstrous.
“I don’t really like all the characters we do,” Marchetto says with a smile.
“But we couldn’t do the show without them!” Hennekam breaks in.
*
Rather than merely lampooning stars, Marchetto sends up the entire idea of celebrity, using humor to gently prick the bubble of glamour and fame. He describes his characters not as impersonations or parodies, but as his own quirky, highly personal takes on larger-than-life personas, from Maria Callas to Marge Simpson.
“I prefer to say that I take one character and make them like a cartoon,” Marchetto explains. “I don’t want to be like them.”
“It’s a very free impersonation,” Hennekam adds.
The third member of this essentially two-man team is a brown leather duffel case, about the size of a golf club bag, used to store Marchetto’s costumes. Weighing in at 60 pounds, it once disappeared in Morocco and another time somehow got routed to Moscow while Marchetto and Hennekam ended up in Madrid.
Marchetto says the show’s earliest outline first occurred to him in a daydream many years ago while working at his father’s coffee-machine repair shop in Venice.
“I was 21 years old, and I saw Marilyn Monroe in a dream, and I woke up and I take a piece of cardboard and I made a Marilyn (costume),” he elaborates in his somewhat tentative English. He later wore the costume during Venice’s legendary Carnival, and subsequently turned Monroe into one of the show’s first and most durable characters.
“Mona Lisa, Marilyn and Liza [Minnelli] are the only characters who haven’t changed since the beginning,” he says with a laugh. So far, Madonna has presented the greatest sustained challenge to the show’s ingenuity, Hennekam says, “because every time she does another album, we have to change the costume.” To date, there have been six Madonnas, including one incarnation in which the singer’s paper cone-shaped bra came outfitted with sparklers.
“I had to breathe all the smoke! It was a nightmare for me,” Marchetto recalls.
“The costume never caught fire,” Hennekam adds. “I don’t know why.”
Growing up, Marchetto says, he was a dreamy, introverted child. His imagination fell under the spell of Venice, with its deceptive maze of streets and watery illusions, a city where nothing is as it seems.
He would sing along to Disney movies and the records his parents would buy him. His father played guitar and clarinet and shared his son’s love of cartoons. At school, Marchetto learned to paint and make paper wigs and, later, to sew. When left alone in his father’s shop, he would lip-sync.
At 16, he went to work in a mask shop, an apprenticeship that eventually helped him land a job as a Carnival costume designer. He began testing his exotic outfits on the streets of the Rialto, drawing stunned and delighted stares. “‘I was scared of what the people can think of my performance, but it was very important for me to try.”
Briefly pondering a career in design, Marchetto decided to study at the Scuola Dell’Arte in Italy. But after attending a workshop by the English mime Lindsey Kemp, he knew he’d found his true purpose. “For me it was like he opened my heart, my eyes, and I realized maybe I should do something like that.”
*
Marchetto’s first show-biz break was winning first prize at Bologna’s La Zanzara D’Oro festival of new comics in 1988. He caught the attention of Italian TV and began working on a show about the life of Leopoldo Fregoli, a famous turn-of-the-century Italian trasformista, or quick-change performer. About that time, he met Hennekam, who had studied fashion and costume design at Studio Bercot in Paris and worked on Thierry Mugler’s menswear collections.
Invited to attend the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1990, Marchetto and Hennekam whipped together 18 new characters and became an overnight cult hit. Boosted by word of mouth and endorsements from singers Boy George and Kate Bush, the show began touring at festivals in Canada, Australia and Japan, and launched the first of several successful London runs. By 1994, Marchetto had been nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award, the British equivalent of the Tonys, and was the subject of a one-hour Granada TV documentary in which Steven Berkoff and others waxed euphoric over his singular talent.
Marchetto finally reached the United States last year, performing in San Francisco (where he was spotted by Geffen artistic director Randall Arney) and earning a Drama Desk Award nomination for “unique theatrical experience” in New York. You may have spotted him posing in paper bouffant wig and glasses in ads for l.a.Eyeworks.
*
For their L.A. debut, Marchetto and Hennekam say they toyed briefly with creating f new site-specific characters--maybe Big Boy or Angelyne? “Is she still alive?” Marchetto asks innocently. They also considered substituting miniatures of Al Gore and George W. Bush for a pair of singing fox-fur heads that accompany “Doris Day” on “Que Sera, Sera.”
While some critics have discerned deep meanings from these sorts of details, the two men prefer to keep things less serious--or at least more ambiguous. “You can see the show at a lot of different levels, and you can read a lot into it,” Hennekam says.
Indeed, as long as the world keeps producing grandiose personalities, he and his partner should have material for years to come.
“This gives me life to continue,” Marchetto says. “I need to have fresh characters all the time. I like to have a different crowd in front of me.”
*
“ENNIO: STARRING ENNIO MARCHETTO,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. Dates: Opens Thursday. Plays Tuesdays-Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m.; also Dec. 13, 2 p.m. Ends Dec. 31. Prices: $20-$42. Phone: (310) 208-5454.
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24f78f95b507a1f786ccf1cba315cb80 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-oct-01-tm-29471-story.html | Requiem For The Onyx Cafe | Requiem For The Onyx Cafe
I’m digging into my duck confit at Cafe Figaro on North Vermont Avenue, sipping a Pinot Noir, and it’s only vaguely weird. This used to be the Onyx Cafe, a scribbling, strumming, chain-smoking stew of artists, skater kids, conspiracy mongers and other fringe characters. But at the tres swank Figaro, they’ve done an impressive job of obliterating any vestige of my once-beloved haunt. That pitted concrete floor that was “cleaned” every year or so by having a coat of gray paint spilled over it is now a muted checkerboard of yellow and red clay tiles. Gone are the fruit flies over the bakery case, the mythically proportioned roaches and the jumble of mismatched chairs and tables that characterized this spot in the days--10 years worth--when I guzzled gallons of apathetically prepared coffee and hung out there every second of my free and not-so-free time.
As the ‘80s became the ‘90s, alternative culture become Alternative, and more and more people “discovered” our funky Los Feliz/Silver Lake neighborhood. Gradually, a once-moribund strip of real estate started fetching top dollar, until, of course, it eventually priced out the little coffeehouse that started it all. The rent was adjusted and voila, Cafe Figaro.
While the Onyx’s Boho vibe evolved organically and was often (hyperbolically, I’ll admit) compared to Paris in the ‘20s, the Figaro seems literally transplanted from France--the cuisine, the service, the wine, even the oh-so-petite Coke bottles. I would’ve checked it out sooner except, a few months after it opened, the ultra-Gallic staff was rejiggered. The Figaro closed for a number of weeks while a more tolerable French-lite staff was hired. After the reopening, I waited for the place to hit its stride, then made a reservation.
The Onyx was barely a business; the regulars were charged on a sliding scale that often slid to zero. Tonight’s dinner for two will come out to $111, plus tip. What’s remarkable (besides the fact that I can cover it) is how tasty I find the confit even if I do feel like I’m chewing on the corpse of my once-favorite scene.
*
I GREW UP IN AN ORTHODOX JEWISH ENCLAVE IN BROOKLYN. From the moment I was old enough to realize that I was being raised to get married, make money, have kids and settle down near a temple where I could spend my Saturdays with other people who’d done the same, I dreamed of escape. In 1983, I moved to L.A.
Upon my arrival, I tried to figure out where in this urban sprawl I belonged. I spent the ‘80s drifting eastward, chasing wisps of scenes, looking for a place where the people who didn’t fit in fit in. That continued until I walked into this crazy coffeehouse with blue, yellow and red Formica tables and Fiestaware cups and teapots.
This was still the “old” Onyx, next to the Vista Theater on Sunset Drive, which owner John Leech and then-partner Fumiko Robinson opened in 1982. Their idea was to start a neighborhood coffeehouse like the ones they’d seen in San Francisco. I discovered it in 1987, but I didn’t become an Onyx fixture until two years later, after it had re-established itself on Vermont Avenue.
The Onyx did not filter out the street experience. You could hang out there all day (and many of us did) and not buy a thing. It was managed with such passivity that even the homeless and crack-addicted would make themselves at home. Only the most violent or malodorous were forced to leave.
The clientele, employees and management shared a refreshing hostility toward condos, “tony” (the buzzword back then) restaurants, BMWs and anything to do with the film industry. People were talking, reading, loafing and playing chess. How radical in those pre-espresso-chic days to find a social atmosphere that wasn’t dumbed down with alcohol (although brown-bagging wasn’t exactly unheard of). It also occurred to me that this wouldn’t be a bad place to pick up girls.
I loved Vermont Avenue, its brick apartment buildings, shoe stores, locksmith, the Armenian grocery on the corner. I moved to a $450-a-month apartment in Silver Lake and kissed West-of-Highland goodbye. For the next 10 years, I couldn’t pass Vermont without succumbing to the urge to stop in at the Onyx and “see if anything was happening.”
I didn’t understand what “happenings” were until I experienced them at the Onyx. Sometimes they were planned events, such as the weekend when the place was redecorated to resemble a ‘50s Beat cafe. Other times, the happenings were spontaneous eruptions, like the raucous percussion jams or simply breathtaking bits of human drama that only made sense if you were already familiar with the characters involved. Anything, no matter how crazy, could be tried here. With a friend, I once published the work of an old psychiatric patient who would slave for hours writing a single elegant line such as “money is the only thing we can all agree on.” At the signing of “A Utopia of the Everyday Kind,” published via MacIntosh and photocopy machine, we sold out our full run of 100 at $1 each.
*
TIME WAS SWALLOWED IN A VEGAS-LIKE VORTEX. TEN MINUTES would melt into an hour, all night, your whole life. It’s easy to say Onyx and slacker in the same breath, but the place did launch Beck and others. I, too, entered the place a dabbler, but I gradually realized that applying myself to freelance writing would be the most logical way to subsidize a life where I could hang out in coffee shops.
To this day, much of my social world comes from people I met through the Onyx. There were weddings, births and deaths. And gossip. When the Northridge quake jolted us awake, we drove past the Onyx to see if it was OK. In one of his finest moments, Chief (our nickname for Leech) defied the curfew and kept the cafe open after hours during the L.A. riots.
With the Onyx established on Vermont, more consciously hip establishments followed. Hipsters rediscovered the Dresden Room, where for 20 years prior, Marty & Elayne had crooned to a bare room. In 1993, the Derby opened, followed by the movie “Swingers” and lounge chic. It was cool for a while. Fresh blood. People (well, girls) we dubbed the “Silver Lake Social Climbers,” who had read about the neighborhood first in the underground rags, then in Details and Vanity Fair, came to the Onyx and ordered a latte.
While it was hard not to feel vindicated, few were ignorant of the tendency for hip fringe scenes to get co-opted. That “uh-oh” moment came in 1997. The old greasy spoon, George’s, had closed the previous year. This genuine ‘50s article was stripped down and gussied up as the ersatz retro-diner Fred 62. What we outcasts from the ‘80s had created in an overlooked cranny of Los Angeles had become “the hot new thing.” The Range Rover crowd not only commuted here, they moved in. Rents rose. There was a time that the first question people asked about the neighborhood was, “Is it safe?” Now we had neighbors such as Madonna, who required a certain standard of retail services.
The new merchants and neighbors began to be less and less enamored of the funky little coffeehouse and the element it attracted. But the element had changed also. The artists, the people with the creative energy, gradually drifted away, leaving only the hangers-on (barnacles, I called them). The entry was often a gantlet of steely-eyed losers, some downright sinister.
Magazines still unfailingly mentioned the Onyx in their write-ups of the “Silver Lake Scene,” but when the tourists arrived, they’d look around with a puzzled expression and go: “This?!”
I should’ve left, too. By this time, I had a writing career going. But a mix of sentimentality, laziness (anything is better than staying home and trying to write) and morbid fascination kept me coming back. Sure, I caught the occasional spark of the old magic, but it was dulled by the thickening layers of muck. As it approached entropy, the Onyx was like a lovable dog gone old and arthritic. Someone had to have the heart to put it down, which happened when the lease expired in November 1998.
The vacant storefront went through various stages: the shrine, the post-mortems, followed by the fliers and graffiti. Contractor types came in and out, transforming the spot. Almost a year after the Onyx closed, Cafe Figaro opened. As everyone feared, yuppie chow had arrived.
People griped, but it wasn’t really the Onyx that was the victim; an entire neighborhood, even an era were gone. It’s possible to sit outside with a cup of joe at the adjacent Boulangerie, but even though I’m not the poor scrabbler I once was, I feel out of place collaborating with the Parisian pomp of the spiffily aproned waiter with the French accent.
A blander and less elitist coffeehouse opened down the street to accommodate the Onyx’s dazed refugees, but no thank you to that. Ironically, I still squander many hours at a nearby cafe owned by the Cafe Figaro folks. It has a relaxed vibe and even tolerates (for better or worse) a touch of slack. Of course, it’s got none of the magic that made the Onyx so addictive. That magic was a product of a particular time, and those who haven’t moved on seem the worse for it. If anything, I wish the Onyx hadn’t sullied its legacy by sputtering on as long as it did. It irks me to hear, as I do periodically, some of the newly arrived ask, “Didn’t there used to be some dirty coffee shop here?” And I feel like saying, “Yeah, well, if not for that dirty coffee shop. . . .”
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eb1bb9962483f961717634f1de4c177e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-oct-01-tv-30240-story.html | Better Late Than Never | Better Late Than Never
With endless reruns and Sydney’s Summer Olympics behind them, the networks finally can go for the gold with a belated fall season we’ve waited for since May.
The Class of 2000 consists of 30 new series yielding the usual mixed bag of comedy, drama and action, without a single newsmagazine or reality show in the bunch.
Most of the networks are counting on familiar faces (Andre Braugher, John Goodman, Craig T. Nelson and Michael Richards) to pick them up, but they’ve also made room for a couple of star-driven showcases with Bette Midler and Geena Davis.
Two wild cards in this unpredictable deck are Al Gore and George W. Bush, who will star in prime-time shows of their own ... the presidential debates. With the baseball playoffs, World Series and November sweeps just ahead, it’s the most atypical autumn in four years.
Accordingly, here are the corporate bottom lines: Does ABC have the final answer with four nights of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”? Can CBS survive without “Survivor”? Will NBC’s peacock preen again after last year’s disappointing third-place finish? Can Fox fix its problems with science fiction? Is the WB ready to reclaim the fickle teens who have moved beyond “Dawson’s Creek”? What’s the future of UPN, whose key affiliates are now owned by Rupert Murdoch’s aggressive News Corp.? And can Pax, the seventh network, acquire a higher profile with family fare?
In time-honored tradition, we offer a nightly overview, or scorecard if you will. Some shows will hit. Most will miss. And others will come off the bench before the bird is basted on Thanksgiving.
A word of warning for all you rookies out there: Avoid slow starts. Patience, after all, has never been a virtue in executive suites.
SUNDAY
“Ed”
8 p.m. NBC
Premieres next Sunday
Who says you can’t go home again? One day, Ed Stevens (Tom Cavanagh) is a happily married attorney at a prestigious New York law firm. The next, he loses his job, catches his wife with the mailman (now there’s a government employee who delivers) and buys a bowling alley in his hometown of Stuckeyville, Ohio. That’s where Ed befriends Carol (Julie Bowen), the “girl he’s always dreamed of,” and moves in with his old buddy, a droll doctor (Josh Randall) with a multi-tasking wife (Jana Marie Hupp) who has a peculiar way of entertaining their infant. Ed’s eccentric employees include a slacker whose favorite pop-culture reference is “Whatcha talkin’ about, Willis?” Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks, you see. Starting over for Ed means opening a law practice inside the bowling alley. Just don’t call him “the first bowling-alley lawyer.” He’s not fond of that phrase.
First Impressions: A potentially sweet treat in the vein of “Northern Exposure.” But even with the charming Cavanagh and an assortment of oddballs to spare, this quirky romantic comedy from David Letterman producers Rob Burnett and Jon Beckerman will be fighting to bowl over the entrenched “Touched by an Angel” and “The Simpsons,” which still makes us laugh after all these years.
“Hype”
9 p.m. WB
Premieres next Sunday
A trio of “Mad TV” writers created this pop-culture sketch comedy which executive producer Terry Sweeney says will “hype everything in the media” with a sensibility and structure similar to “Laugh-In.” Expect “short sketches, short bits--everything is going to move much faster,” explains Sweeney.
First Impressions: Not fast enough. Crude and gleefully offensive, the pilot features pale impersonations of Bryant Gumbel, Britney Spears, President Clinton and Japanese game shows. If flatulence and ugly caricatures are your idea of fun, this is the show for you. With “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” “The X-Files” and network movies attracting most of America, all the hyperbole in the world won’t help “Hype.”
“Nikki”
9:30 p.m. WB
Premieres next Sunday
She seeks stardom as a Las Vegas showgirl. He’s learning the ropes as a pro wrestler. As a newly married couple, they’re grappling with a formidable foe who can foil their future: his overbearing mother (Christine Estabrook). Relatively speaking, that’s trouble. Can naughty but nice Nikki (Nikki Cox) and big Dwight (Nick von Esmarch) pin down their respective dreams in good ol’ Lost Wages? Don’t expect any encouragement from Dwight’s mom, who has a way with words: “I’m not saying give up your dreams. Just do what everyone else does. Push them way down deep inside you.”
First Impressions: Opposites attract in this lightweight comedy, which has the dubious distinction of occupying the worst slot on the WB slate. If you doubt us, ask the producers of “Jack & Jill,” which languished at the base of the Nielsens last year.
MONDAY
“Boston Public”
8 p.m. Fox
Premieres Oct. 23
First, he fashioned a show around Beantown barristers. Now David E. Kelley uses Boston as the backdrop for a drama about suburban high school teachers. Chi McBride, who managed to survive “The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer,” plays the principal. Fyvush Finkel, who worked with Kelley on “Picket Fences,” is one of the instructors.
First Impressions: The prolific, Emmy-winning Kelley got the green light for this unpreviewed show without producing a prototype, which illustrates their faith in his talent. Last season, ABC miscalculated by pairing his quickly canceled “Snoops” with “The Practice.” That hasn’t stopped Fox from mapping a similar strategy by coupling “Boston Public” with “Ally McBeal,” whose story lines strayed into strange terrain last year.
“Yes, Dear”
8:30 p.m. CBS
Premieres Monday
Look up “neurotic” in Webster’s and you’re liable to find a photo of Kim Warner (Jean Louisa Kelly). Tightly wound and overprotective, Kim yearns to be Super Mom for her 1-year-old son. Fortunately, she finds help from husband Greg (Anthony Clark), an accountant who, uh, has her number. No help is forthcoming from Kim’s carefree sister Christine (Liza Snyder) and her hapless hubby Jimmy (Mike O’Malley), who would sooner spend an afternoon with his kids at a casino than a sunny day in the park. So, one couple takes baby steps toward parenthood and the other lets the chips fall where they may. Who’s got it together? That remains to be seen. Just don’t expect either of these odd couples to agree on anything.
First Impressions: What can you say about a standard sitcom that boasts one good sight gag in 30 minutes? We hesitate to give it away, but let’s just say this show fails to walk on water. Is renewal beyond the first season likely? No, dear.
“Tucker”
8:30 p.m. NBC
Premieres Monday
Tucker is a bright 14-year-old kid (Eli Marienthal) starting life anew with an aggravating aunt (Katey Sagal). He and his cash-strapped mother (Noelle Beck) move in after his father abandons them for a younger woman. Aunt Claire (Sagal) has a foul 15-year-old son named Leon (Nathan Lawrence) who collects human hair and makes crude comments about the cute blond next door. Getting to know the teasing McKenna (Alison Lohman) may be tough for Tucker. How so? Gossipy Claire is quickly spreading the word that he’s a neighborhood pervert. Must have something to do with the day Tucker accidentally spotted her stepping into the shower without a towel.
First Impressions: Shunning good taste and originality, this “Malcolm in the Middle” knockoff is paired with “Daddio,” which will vie for families opposite the WB’s “7th Heaven.” Sagal, who’s lucky to have another gig as a voice on Fox’s “Futurama,” may not have two jobs for long.
“Deadline”
9 p.m. NBC
Premieres Monday
Dick Wolf has dealt with law and order. Now he turns to the Fourth Estate, casting character actor Oliver Platt as Wallace Benton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose Nothing But the Truth column appears in the fictional New York Ledger. Benton is witty (“I’m not anti-social. I just don’t like that many people”), resourceful and just a bit shady when it comes to ethics. Part of his time is spent teaching a seminar in investigative journalism with students eager to get the facts.
First Impressions: Enhanced by its New York locations, this entertaining entry boasts a good cast that includes Bebe Neuwirth and Hope Davis as Benton’s acerbic editor and bitter ex-wife, respectively. Tom Conti and Lili Taylor are other regulars. Benton is a wonderful role for Platt, who should have a grand time with it.
“Girlfriends”
9:30 p.m. UPN
Already premiered
A cross between “Living Single” and “Sex and the City,” this ensemble comedy revolves around the ups and downs of four women. Joan (Tracee Ellis Ross), an attorney who’s “staring at 30,” has a great house and a junior partnership but no one to share her success. Tart Maya (Golden Brooks), who has a tendency to drop her verbs, is described as “Miss Ghetto Superstar” by the shallow, materialistic Toni (Jill Marie Jones). Lynn (Persia White), a perpetual student, rounds out the quartet.
First Impressions: Laughs are few and far between in this dismal, derivative sitcom. Making matters worse, Joan occasionally stares into the camera and talks to the audience, a hoary gimmick that was done to death last season. “Girlfriends” gets the slot previously held by the defunct “Malcolm & Eddie,” which is hardly doing it a favor.
TUESDAY
“The Michael Richards Show”
8 p.m. NBC
Premieres Oct. 24
The Emmy-winning “Seinfeld” alumnus stars as Vic Nardozza, a bumbling sleuth at a detective agency run by a “media-savvy” owner (William Devane). Tim Meadows (“Saturday Night Live”) is a colleague with a past as a Peeping Tom, Bill Cobbs (“The Others”) is the wily veteran and Amy Farrington plays it by the book.
First Impressions: It’s always a bad omen when the prototype for a show is overhauled before anyone sees it. That’s the case with this unpreviewed comedy developed by three “Seinfeld” producers. Will Richards be playing a variation of Kramer? Will any of his old chums drop in during the sweeps? NBC should be so lucky.
“Dark Angel”
9 p.m. Fox
Premieres Tuesday
Hollywood heavyweight James Cameron, in his first TV project, is an executive producer of this 21st century fantasy about the post-apocalyptic adventures of a genetically enhanced woman. As a child, Max (Jessica Alba) and her brethren escaped from military creators, including the ruthless Lydecker (John Savage), now under orders to capture them at any cost. As an adult, the bioengineered beauty possesses potent powers. In the pilot, she fearlessly leaps across buildings, out-muscles the males and races around a motel room at a crisp clip. Max, who sports a cool look in black leather, joins forces with Logan Cale (Michael Weatherly), a crusading cyber-journalist equally determined to bring down the oppressive establishment in the Pacific Northwest.
First Impressions: The bright spot in “Dark Angel” is its limber, full-lipped star who once frolicked with Flipper. Fox paid a pretty penny for an elaborate pilot overseen by the canny Cameron and his longtime friend Charles Eglee (“Murder One”). Whether it earns titanic ratings partly rests on an ability to lure males from the WB, whose “Angel” airs at the same time. Fox can pursue a youthful demographic since older adults will be opting for “Frasier” and “Dharma & Greg.”
“The Geena Davis Show”
9:30 p.m. ABC
Premieres Oct. 10
Manhattan single woman Teddie Cochran (Geena Davis) organizes benefits, mediates political causes and proudly claims to be on Warren Beatty’s speed dial. But can she handle cloying kids? As the central character in this domestic comedy, Teddie better be ready. Life changes abruptly when a whirlwind romance leads to marriage and instant parenthood with Max Ryan (Peter Horton), a conservative journalist with two children--a teen (John Francis Daley) and a tyke (Makenzie Vega). When the going gets tough, Teddie turns to a pair of chatty friends (Kim Coles and Mimi Rogers).
First Impressions: The delightful Davis is usually an asset to any project, but her energy and exuberance aren’t enough to salvage a trite, predictable pilot. ABC has high hopes for its Academy Award-winning star, who earned her honor for “The Accidental Tourist.” Well, you knew it wasn’t “Cutthroat Island,” right?
“DAG”
9:30 p.m. NBC
Premieres Oct. 31
“The West Wing,” with ding-a-lings. Secret Service agent Jerome Daggett (David Alan Grier) would gladly take a bullet for the president (David Rasche), blank as he may be. By inadvertently diving away from one, he now finds himself protecting the assertive first lady (Delta Burke). “I’m stuck ‘Driving Miss Daisy,’ ” Daggett moans. And driving him crazy are two colleagues--one inept (Stephen Dunham), the other overzealous (Emmy Laybourne).
First Impressions: As an NBC Studios production, this broad comedy stands to get a longer lease on life. That’s a break for a show whose level of humor initially comes up short compared to “Frasier,” the smart and sophisticated Emmy winner preceding it.
WEDNESDAY
“Bette”
8 p.m. CBS
Premieres Oct. 11
Bette Midler gets the lion’s share of what passes for funny lines in this star vehicle. “Please, let the band be sober,” she pleads aloud before hitting the stage. Later, she frets, “I look like the last 20 minutes of ‘For the Boys.’ ” And while preparing for a rare night of passion with husband Roy (Kevin Dunn), she proposes a provocative option: “Lady or the tramp?” The self-effacing Midler pokes good-natured fun at herself as the egocentric and sometimes wacky star of this exaggerated bio-com created by Jeffrey Lane (“Mad About You”). In it, she plays a facsimile of the flashy, over-the-top entertainer we know so well. When Hollywood throws her a curve, she seeks her inner circle: best friend and manager Connie (Joanna Gleason), accompanist Oscar (James Dreyfus) and 13-year-old daughter Rose (Marina Malota). Don’t underestimate this close-knit group, which can tackle any tricky situation, whether it’s a visit to the plastic surgeon or Danny DeVito’s desire to work with Bette
First Impressions: Love her or leave her? The merry Midler has a legion of faithful fans, but her appeal is hardly across the board. And the so-so shtick could grow tiresome in a hurry. Going head-to-head with a fourth edition of ABC’s “Millionaire” is another drawback. Will viewers opt for Reege or Bette? The outcome may not be divine for CBS.
“Titans”
8 p.m. NBC
Premieres Wednesday
In hopes of building another dynasty, the king of prime-time soaps sets his latest saga in Beverly Hills, a city he knows very well. Aaron Spelling’s favorite ZIP Code is home to chiseled Chandler Williams (Casper Van Dien), a flyboy whose fabulously wealthy father (Perry King) is about to marry his second bride, the wicked Heather (Yasmine Bleeth). What dad doesn’t know is that Chandler had a Hawaiian fling with this back-stabbing babe, who wants to rid the neighborhood of King’s first wife (Victoria Principal). Add Jack Wagner (“Melrose Place”) and Ingo Rademacher (“General Hospital”) as well as treachery, alcoholism and sibling rivalry, and you have the groundwork for a season of sin, steam and suds.
First Impressions: Van Dien is all looks and no range, which pretty much makes Bleeth the best reason to watch. So bad it’s good, some will say, but clearly this sleek silliness wasn’t conceived as the “guilty pleasure” NBC promoted throughout the summer. Our guess is Bleeth and Principal will be sniping at each other like Joan Collins and Linda Evans. Will catfights be part of the package?
“Normal, Ohio”
8 p.m. Fox
Premieres Nov. 1
John Goodman stars as Butch, a good-natured guy who happens to be gay. After coming out to his wife (Mo Gaffney) and son (Greg Pitts), he moved to Los Angeles for four years. Now the divorced, family oriented Butch is back in Ohio, where he helps his sister raise two kids. Veterans Orson Bean and Anita Gillette play his parents.
First Impressions: Another unpreviewed show whose concept and original title (“Don’t Ask”) have been revamped since spring by producers Bonnie and Terry Turner (“That ‘70s Show,” “3rd Rock From the Sun”). It’s a wobbly start for Goodman, who had a nine-year run as Roseanne’s blue-collar husband. Lightning as they say, seldom strikes twice.
“Welcome to New York”
8:30 p.m. CBS
Premieres Oct. 11
Sunny, small-town weatherman hits a cold front in Manhattan. That’s where wholesome Hoosier Jim Gaffigan has been hired by Marsha Bickner (“Cybill’s” Christine Baranski, at her chilliest), the aloof producer of “AM New York.” Marsha doesn’t like Jim’s taste in brown apparel or his “corn-fed belly,” but she desperately needs someone on her side in an ongoing skirmish with network suits. Another cloud hanging over Jim’s balding head: an insecure anchor (Rocky Carroll) who feels threatened by his arrival.
First Impressions: Without a strong foundation, it’s tough to build a sturdy ensemble. That’s the awkward situation facing Gaffigan and Baranski, who have minimal comic chemistry in the early going. This project was developed for Gaffigan, with Baranski plugged into the equation, which does not add up to an auspicious start.
“The Street”
9 p.m. Fox
Premieres Nov. 1
Creator Darren Star (“Sex and the City”) is bullish on bedrooms and the Big Board in this busy ensemble drama set on Wall Street. Go-getter Jack Kenderson (Tom Everett Scott) has smarts and sharp instincts. Fiancee Alexandra Brill (Nina Garbiras) is a Harvard MBA with brains and beauty. Shady salesman Freddie Sacker (Rick Hoffman) is a conceited sexist who rubs his boss (Jennifer Connelly) the wrong way. Former Navy SEAL Mark McConnell (Sean Maher) overachieves to compensate for his blue-collar background. And research analyst Adam Mitchell (Adam Goldberg) has a passion for numbers and a certain warrior princess. Will there be sex in this setting? C’mon, do you really think these Star-crossed characters would be bores in the boudoir?
First Impressions: It’s been a stellar year for Star, but his stock falls here. Even serials as slick as this one need a few weeks to work out the kinks, but that’s a luxury when you’re opposite heavy hitters like “The West Wing” and “The Drew Carey Show.” Shrewd viewers would be wise to invest their time elsewhere.
“Gideon’s Crossing”
10 p.m. ABC
Premieres Oct. 10
As head of experimental medicine at a renowned teaching hospital, Dr. Benjamin Gideon (Andre Braugher) wrestles with life-threatening illness and tackles the personal lives of his patients. “A doctor never expresses anger, plays favorites or fosters false hope,” he proclaims. Good words to live by, but easier said than done for this complex and compassionate physician created by Paul Attanasio, the exceptional mind behind “Homicide: Life on the Street,” which yielded an Emmy for Braugher, who was brilliant as Det. Frank Pembleton. An intelligent man who sneers at defeat, Gideon teaches a staff of young students while seeking counsel from his colleague Max Cabranes (Ruben Blades), the hospital’s chief executive.
First Impressions: It’s great to have Braugher operating again in prime time, but can he slice and dice “Law & Order,” the heart and soul of NBC’s Wednesday lineup? Initially, this medical drama does not measure up to the lofty standards of the esteemed “Homicide,” but what would? In “Homicide,” Braugher was part of a superb ensemble. Here, he leads the way for a cast of newcomers.
THURSDAY
“Gilmore Girls”
8 p.m. WB
Premieres Thursday
Set in Connecticut, this character-driven drama centers on Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham), a single mother raising her 16-year-old daughter Rory (Alexis Bledel). Lorelai lost out on a well-rounded education, which explains why she wants Rory to attend a top prep school in Hartford. To make it happen, Lorelai must swallow her pride and ask for financial help from her WASPish parents (Edward Herrmann and Kelly Bishop). Up to now, the independent Lorelai has always provided for Rory, in spite of past mistakes and pinched pennies. It’s a relationship that yields the occasional tart exchange, as in Rory to Lorelai: “You’re happy.” Lorelai: “Yeah.” Rory: “Did you do something slutty?” Lorelai: “Not that happy.”
First Impressions: Wise, witty and inviting, this engaging hour sets the bar for first-year dramas. Meshing perfectly, Graham and Bledel are a delightful duo we can root for, and the writing is just biting enough to bring us back for more. Unfortunately, it faces an uphill battle against some old “Friends” who have knocked off lots of shows. Let’s hope this doesn’t turn out to be another.
“Cursed”
8:30 p.m. NBC
Premieres Oct. 26
Steven Weber wings it as Jack Nagle, a Chicago ad executive with a curse on his head and a bull’s-eye on his back. Jack was running on a fast track until he ticked off the wrong woman, a jilted blind date whose spell has spoiled everything. Now, angry strangers are chasing him around town and no one can help, including his ex-girlfriend (Amy Pietz) and freeloading buddy (Chris Elliott).
First Impressions: An apt title for yet another dreadful NBC comedy in a desirable time slot. Or had you forgotten about “Jesse,” “Union Square” and “Single Guy”? With such a limited, ill-conceived premise, the show’s strategic placement means nothing. Cursed, indeed!
FRIDAY
“The Fugitive”
8 p.m. CBS
Premieres Friday
“We got ourselves a manhunt.” Again! Wrongly convicted of killing his wife, Dr. Richard Kimble (Tim Daly) flees from the long arm of the law, namely the relentless Lt. Philip Gerard (Mykelti Williamson). Altering his look, the crafty Kimble crisscrosses the country in a frustrating quest to catch the one-armed killer, somehow eluding his pursuer at every turn.
First Impressions: The suspenseful pilot is likely to please a large audience, but how many will return week after week for a premise already played to perfection in a long-running series and hit film? David Janssen was the quintessential Everyman in the original ABC drama, and Harrison Ford was equally winning as the put-upon protagonist. Does Daly have what it takes to sustain interest in this curious revival? John McNamara (“Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman”) and Roy Huggins, who created the well-traveled concept, will shape this new incarnation.
“Freedom”
8 p.m. UPN
Premieres Oct. 27
Stocks have hit rock bottom. The economy has crumbled. And terrorists have blown the president out of the sky. The result: a totalitarian society that favors might over right. Taking up arms as part of the resistance are four highly trained fighters (Holt McCallany, Scarlett Chorvat, Bodhi Elfman and Darius McCrary) striking to restore the country to its past glory.
First Impressions: An unpreviewed action-drama from producer Joel Silver (“The Strip”), who courts the same crowd of 18- to 34-year-old males that turned UPN around with “WWF Smackdown!”
“The Trouble With Normal”
8:30 p.m. ABC
Premieres Friday
Meet people who fear people. Bob (David Krumholtz) thinks a neighbor Zack (Jon Cryer) is spying on him from the adjoining apartment. Imagine the surprise when he turns out to be right. “Two paranoid people living right next door to each other. What are the odds of that?,” asks Claire (Paget Brewster), Bob’s trusty therapist. “In New York, I’d say 50-50,” replies Max (Brad Raider), Bob’s friend, another fellow who believes the world is closing in on them. At this point, there’s no turning back for Claire. As Zack explains, “Conventional ran for the hills the minute you let us in.”
First Impressions: Conventional it’s not, but this fractured farce is just too weird to be watchable. Going into therapy is serious business. In this strange sitcom, it’s just not funny business.
“Grosse Pointe”
8:30 p.m. WB
Already premiered
Darren Star never wrote intentionally funny dialogue on “Beverly Hills, 90210.” In this new satire, he’ll be expected to generate plenty of it. The half-hour comedy centers on a fictional melodrama whose teenage characters bear more than a passing resemblance to the key players on “90210.” We shouldn’t mention any names, but the conniving brunet Hunter (Irene Molloy), the insecure redhead Marcy (Lindsay Sloane) and the balding Quentin (Kohl Sudduth) certainly look a lot like Shannen, Tori and Luke. Others in the attractive ensemble are Courtney (Bonnie Somerville), a striking blond who’s always seeking motivation in her scenes, and dreamy but dimwitted surfer dude Johnny (Al Santos), whose idea of the perfect morning is “Surf, sex and smokes. All before 9.”
First Impressions: Sly, sharply written and perfectly played by a swell young cast, the pilot gives all indications this could be one of the fall’s funniest shows. Satire is tough to sustain over the long haul, but here’s hoping Star and his staff can pull it off.
“C.S.I.”
9 p.m. CBS
Premieres Friday
Forensic scientist Gil Grissom (William Petersen) works the graveyard shift in Las Vegas, where his seasoned Crime Scene Investigation unit can “re-create what happened without ever having been there.” Or as co-worker and single mother Catherine Willows (Marg Helgenberger) observes, “We’re kids being paid to solve a puzzle,” whether it involves a suspicious home invasion or a “trick roll,” which is slang for a hooker robbing a john. Jim Brass (Paul Guilfoyle) is a brittle boss whose team includes two young turks (George Eads and Gary Dourdan) eager to advance by solving their 100th crime. Jorja Fox (“The West Wing”) plays another member of the unit. “We restore peace of mind,” says Grissom, and they do it with the sort of gallows humor you might expect from a late-night crew.
First Impressions: Television hasn’t glorified this kind of laborious legwork since “Quincy” mothballed his microscope. It produced a nice run for Jack Klugman, but executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer (“Coyote Ugly”) may find longevity harder to come by. Look for “Dateline NBC” to lead the way as the bridge between “Providence” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”
“FreakyLinks”
9 p.m. Fox
Premieres Friday
“The Blair Witch Project” meets “Tales of the Unexpected” in a supernatural show tying stories to the Internet. Wide-eyed, often perplexed Derek Barnes (Ethan Embry) runs an occult Web site designed to help others “find answers in a world overflowing with questions.” The paramount question for Derek surrounds his twin brother, who died two years earlier. Or did he? If not, who was that dead guy in the bathtub? And what’s up with Vince (Dennis Christopher), a creepy, grizzled mystery man who knows more than he’s telling.
First Impressions: Originally titled “Fearsum,” this would-be fright fest recently was shifted from 8 p.m. to create a slot for “Police Videos,” a reality show that Fox perceives as a compatible lead-in. As a result, it now will compete for teens alongside the WB’s “Popular.” Freaky, eh?
“Level 9"
9 p.m. UPN
Premieres Oct. 27
When high-tech crimes are committed, an elite, “rapid-response” strike force of surveillance experts steps into the fray. In the pilot, their prey is an elusive assassin eliminating informants protected by the witness protection program. FBI agent Anne Price (Kate Hodge), a Fed “obsessed with this stuff,” leads the team made up of unconventional experts drawn from every federal law enforcement agency and the cyber underground.
First Impressions: There’s no chance this violent action drama from producer John Sacret Young can rise to the soaring level of his splendid Vietnam War saga “China Beach.” A racially diverse cast is a plus, but crisper characterizations and better scripts should be a priority.
“Madigan Men”
9:30 p.m. ABC
Premieres Friday
Three generations of Irishmen live and learn together in a New York apartment. Divorced architect Benjamin (Gabriel Byrne), whose wife left him for his nutritionist, hesitates to dip into the dating pool despite a big push from friends. On questions involving the opposite sex, Ben can turn to son Luke (John C. Hensley), already a ladies’ man at 17. Rounding out the trio is Ben’s widowed father Seamus (Roy Dotrice), who rattles off odd proverbs as often as he plays the ponies. Misunderstandings are a given, but there’s love and respect in this household of available men. If only Ben can handle Seamus’ array of adages, such as “Guests and fish start to turn after three days.” Or how about “Empty suitcase. Full heart.” OK, he made that one up.
First Impressions: Irish eyes will be smiling after viewing this amiable and very amusing comedy boasting dandy dialogue and an irresistible ensemble. It’s Byrne’s first try at a series, and judging from the peppy pilot, he’s chosen a winner. And that’s no blarney.
SATURDAY
“That’s Life”
8 p.m. CBS
Premieres tonight at 8
Moves to regular slot Saturday
After supporting roles in “Jenny” and “Stark Raving Mad,” Heather Paige Kent finally lands a lead in this lighthearted drama about a 32-year-old New Jersey gal who enrolls in college. Strong-willed and streetwise, bartender Lydia DeLucca (Kent) breaks an eight-year engagement with a local dolt to become a full-time freshman. Mother Dolly (Ellen Burstyn) wants grandchildren, toll-collector father Frank (Paul Sorvino) wants his New York Giants to win and juvenile brother Paul (Kevin Dillon) just wants to make a pain of himself. Lydia’s supportive friends are sassy (Debi Mazar) and self-absorbed (Kristin Bauer).
First Impressions:
Kent proves to be an appealing and humorous heroine capable of carrying an uneven show that seems all wrong as a lead-in for the hard action of “Walker, Texas Ranger.” On the other hand, the competition is soft--movies on ABC and NBC (until the arrival of XFL games in February) and Fox’s crime-busting “Cops,” which may never die. If this series falters, well, that’s life.
“The District”
10 p.m. CBS
Premieres Saturday
The Coach goes to Washington. Brash and bombastic, Jack Mannion (Craig T. Nelson) is D.C.'s new top cop. “This place won’t know what hit it,” promises Mannion, a maverick who vows to clean up the streets when he isn’t battling bureaucrats and carping colleagues. His entourage includes a trusted public affairs officer (Justin Theroux) and a computer whiz (Lynne Thigpen) banished to the basement. At least one resentful peer (Roger Aaron Brown) expected the job to be his, while the deputy mayor (Jayne Brook) suggests, “We have to play hardball politics.” Watch your back, Jack.
First Impressions: Nelson plays it big and bold in an overwrought pilot packed with improbable subplots that won’t go over well in the District of Columbia. Much of it is hard to swallow and Nelson’s abrasiveness could be dialed down a notch. If the producers are aiming for the edginess of “Law & Order” or “NYPD Blue,” they have a long way to go.
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6cd8d2eb609d8818db01830b135f4135 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-oct-06-ca-32006-story.html | Gritty ‘Tigerland’ Revisits Vietnam War in Boot Camp | Gritty ‘Tigerland’ Revisits Vietnam War in Boot Camp
“Tigerland” is a Vietnam War movie that takes place not in Southeast Asia but in a Louisiana Army boot camp in 1971, and it’s a film with more psychological suspense than action. In short, it is atypical, especially for its director, Joel Schumacher, whose name is synonymous with summer blockbusters and boffo John Grisham adaptations. (He moved in a new direction with his last picture, “Flawless,” which was in essence a two-character drama featuring Robert De Niro’s macho ex-security guard and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s drag queen.)
With this taut, spare drama, which is consistently fresh, engrossing and unpredictable, Schumacher has traveled all the way from “Batman” movies to a picture consciously made in the rigorous spirit and style of Lars von Trier’s anti-glitz Dogma credo--it has that kind of grit and spontaneity. Few big-time Hollywood directors have attempted such a major shifting of gears and done it so successfully.
Armed with a top-notch script by Ross Klavan--who drew upon personal experiences--and Michael McGruther, Schumacher has turned out a film that has an exceptionally strong personal feel to it. “Tigerland” launches a screenful of young and talented actors and wins over even those of us who frankly would rather never have to deal with the Vietnam War on the screen ever again.
We’ve met Colin Farrell’s Bozz before, the cocky private who’s smart and caring but has a real problem with respecting authority. In the conventional war picture he’d shape up by the last reel and emerge a hero. His rite of passage here is not going to be conventional, because Vietnam was not a conventional war; by 1971 it was widely felt to be a losing proposition, even if not everyone admitted it.
“Tigerland” offers a stinging picture of the Army chain of command going through the motions of barking out commands and toughening up new infantrymen in eight weeks of basic training followed by a final week in Tigerland, as close a simulation to Vietnamese jungles as possible. The difference here, and it is profound, is that these young men are being ordered to risk their lives to fight a losing war. So thick you can all but taste it, this feeling seriously erodes the up-and-down-the-line respect that any fighting unit needs.
Most of the young men, however, pretty much keep their feelings to themselves, but Bozz cannot or will not hide his sense of the absurdity and futility of the dehumanizing process he and the others are undergoing. It’s not that Bozz runs off at the mouth all the time; he knows that a glance here and a couple of remarks there are all it takes in these rigid conditions to express an attitude of defiance at the risk of severe consequences.
Not surprisingly, Bozz enrages all of those in positions of command, and while becoming a hero to others, especially when he helps two hapless misfits, Miter and Cantwell (achingly well-played by Clifton Collins Jr. and Thomas Guiry). The brutally realistic and shrewd Capt. Saunders (Nick Searcy) loathes Bozz because he recognizes that he is a born leader who refuses to take responsibility or accept authority.
Bozz becomes the inevitable target of the psychopathic Wilson (Shea Whigham, whom you love to hate), yet this clash doesn’t play out quite the way you predict it will any more than any other aspect of the film; Schumacher creates a lethal atmosphere in which just about anything can happen.
The film’s other key character is Matthew Davis’ Paxton, a college student who becomes friends with Bozz. They are poised young men, more intelligent, articulate and reflective than the others in their platoon. In comparison to Bozz, the knocked-around realist, disillusioned rather than easily cynical, Paxton is naive, not a supporter of the war effort yet willing to serve his country. He keeps a diary in the hopes of becoming another Ernest Hemingway or James Jones. All the tensions, conflicts and contradictions that have been building look to be coming to a boil under the extreme duress of Tigerland.
Farrell and Davis, with only a few screen credits under their belts, are potent discoveries who should receive key career boosts with their performances; indeed, everyone involved in the making of “Tigerland” on both sides of the camera comes out looking good. The film itself, photographed (in 16 millimeter) with stunning immediacy by Matthew Libatique, looks great, its impact punctuated by a consistently apt score composed by Nathan Larson, fresh off “Boys Don’t Cry.” “Tigerland” is tightly constructed and culminates with a stunningly appropriate charge of ambiguity.
* MPAA rating: R, for violence, pervasive language, a scene of strong sexuality/nudity, and for language. Times guidelines: Often frightening and brutal, and while the sex scene is brief, it’s quite graphic; unsuitable for children.
‘Tigerland’
Colin Farrell: Bozz
Matthew Davis: Paxton
Clifton Collins Jr.: Miter
Thomas Guiry: Cantwell
Shea Whigham: Wilson
A 20th Century Fox release of a Regency Enterprises presentation of a Haft Entertainment/New Regency production. Director Joel Schumacher. Producers Arnon Milchan, Steven Haft, Beau Flynn. Executive producer Ted Kurdyla. Screenplay Ross Klavan & Michael McGruther. Cinematographer Matthew Libatique. Editor Mark Stevens. Music Nathan Larson. Production designer Andrew Laws. Set decorator Shawn R. McFall. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.
Exclusively at the AMC Century 14, 10250 Santa Monica Blvd., Century City Shopping Center and GCC Beverly Connection, La Cienega Boulevard at Beverly Boulevard.
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582b1c518dfaca132a0da78116a298e0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-oct-06-me-32143-story.html | The Season of Using Force in the Mideast Has Arrived | The Season of Using Force in the Mideast Has Arrived
In all likelihood, the violence that began in Jerusalem on Sept. 28 marks a major turning point in the Arab-Israeli conflict. And how Israelis respond has direct implications for Americans.
From its creation in 1948 until roughly 1993, Israel consistently pursued a policy of deterrence--signaling to its enemies not to make trouble or they would pay dearly. Though expensive and often painful to pursue, not to speak of unpopular internationally, this tough approach worked; grudgingly and slowly, the opponents of the Jewish state did come to accept its existence.
Yitzhak Rabin’s famous handshake on the White House lawn with Yasser Arafat in 1993 inaugurated a very different policy--a softer, more generous and internationally more acceptable one. Since 1993, Israelis have offered substantial benefits to their enemies (Palestinian autonomy, southern Lebanon, the Golan Heights) and make almost no demands in return.
For example, although Israeli diplomats protest the jihad rhetoric in Arafat’s speeches and the anti-Semitic cartoons in Palestinian newspapers, these are empty complaints; after lodging an objection, the Israelis go right back to negotiations and make further concessions. Palestinian acts of terrorism lead to only momentary breaks in diplomacy, followed by a quick return to the dubiously named peace process.
Israelis are generous in the expectation that goodwill will prompt a reciprocal feeling across the battle line. Forbearance, they hope, will disentangle them from an old and unwanted conflict.
Sad to say, just the opposite has occurred, for Israel’s policy of goodwill has baffled Palestinians and other Arabs. Sometimes it conveys weakness; the Syrian president called Israel’s decision to evacuate southern Lebanon “an Israeli defeat, the first since the creation of the state.” Sometimes goodwill appears as a frightening deception; Shimon Peres’ lovely vision of a benign “new Middle East” translated into Arabic as a terrible Israeli ambition for economic hegemony.
In either case, Israel’s soft policy results in a diminished willingness by its enemies to compromise. Rather than seek partial gains through negotiations, Palestinians are increasingly resolved to win all through force. This dynamic accounts for their near-total lack of interest in Ehud Barak’s jaw-droppingly generous proposals in July. He offered them 90% of the West Bank, 150,000 Palestinians let into Israel, and shared sovereignty over the Temple Mount. But these terms held minimal appeal to a population now demanding 100% of the territory, millions of Palestinians into Israel and full sovereignty.
Although the Palestinians have for years demonstrated a growing impatience with diplomacy, their Israeli (and American) interlocutors seemingly have been blind to this mood, imagining that another piece of paper will assuage them. But Palestinian confidence and aggressiveness now has reached a point at which further Israeli concessions are meaningless. The season for force has arrived.
And so a campaign of violence has began. Judging by current sentiments, it may well last for a long time: “This is a war between religions,” Khalid Abu Araysh, a 25-year-old in Hebron told the Associated Press, “and I’m participating because I’m Muslim.”
The current bloodshed confronts Israel with a choice: Continue on with the seductive post-1993 policy of unilateral withdrawal, hoping against hope that one more concession will induce Palestinian goodwill. Or revert to the less pleasant but far more effective policy of deterrence, putting the Palestinians on notice that Israel will not just protect itself from violence but will reverse Palestinian gains made since 1993; only when the Palestinians show a change of heart--meaning a true renunciation of violence--would negotiations recommence.
The signs are not good. Barak has announced that a “cessation of violence is a precondition for any continuation of the negotiations,” implying his readiness to return to the bargaining table as though nothing much has happened. This signals the Palestinians that their violence has no diplomatic cost, and so ultimately is acceptable to Israel.
Such Israeli weakness has potentially worrisome repercussions for Americans because, as the ultimate guarantor of Israel’s security, the United States has a stake in that country’s safety and welfare. Therefore, rather than encourage Israelis to take steps that further erode its security, as the Clinton administration so enthusiastically does, we should warn them away from the dangerous course they are pursuing.
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6a20edb2eec69137b0717d814deccbe2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-oct-07-mn-32851-story.html | Actor Richard Farnsworth Kills Himself | Actor Richard Farnsworth Kills Himself
Richard Farnsworth, the oldest leading actor to get an Academy Award nomination, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound Friday night, the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department said. He was 80.
Farnsworth’s fiancee, Jewely Van Valin, said he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Farnsworth, a former stuntman, was nominated earlier this year for an Oscar for best actor for his performance in “The Straight Story.”
He had been involved in film making for more than 60 years and recently received a special award from the National Cowboy Symposium in Lubbock, Texas, for his work.
Sheriff Tom Sullivan released a statement Friday night saying Farnsworth died at his home in Lincoln, about 130 miles southeast of Albuquerque. Authorities did not release any further details.
Farnsworth was nominated this year for his portrayal of Alvin Straight, an Iowa man who made headlines in 1994 for riding his lawn mower more than 250 miles to see his ailing, estranged brother.
He was beaten out by Kevin Spacey, who won for his portrayal of a suburban father in “American Beauty.”
“It feels a lot better because I’m getting up there in age and might not have a chance again,” Farnsworth said in an interview after he was nominated in February.
It was the second nomination for Farnsworth, who was nominated for the 1978 film “Comes a Horseman.” Henry Fonda had been the oldest leading actor when he was nominated at age 76 for his role in “On Golden Pond,” which he won in 1982.
Farnsworth was a poor student who dropped out of school during the Depression at age 15 and went to work as a stable boy at a polo barn.
Two years later, in 1937, two men from Paramount studio came by looking for ponies and mentioned they needed someone who could ride horses on film. Farnsworth took the job, which paid $7 a day, about what he had been making per week.
The Los Angeles native moved from stunt work to acting at age 57, appearing in “The Grey Fox,” “The Natural,” “Tom Horn,” “Resurrection” and “Rhinestone.”
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12baf70d70f3a966b0320f1c9a94fd0f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-oct-11-me-34903-story.html | Pasadena Intersection Still Tops List of Dangerous Crossings | Pasadena Intersection Still Tops List of Dangerous Crossings
For the second year in a row, the same Pasadena intersection has been identified as the most perilous in Los Angeles County by the Automobile Club of Southern California.
Walnut Street and Pasadena Avenue, with 15 injury collisions in 1999, topped the list of worst intersections, the Auto Club announced Tuesday. The ranking was based on the number of drivers who caused injury accidents by running red lights and was based on California High Patrol statistics.
In 1998, 18 such crashes occurred at the intersection, which is near the Foothill Freeway and just north of Old Pasadena.
Three of the four worst intersections in the Auto Club ranking are in the San Gabriel Valley, and four of the top 11 are in Pasadena.
The second most dangerous intersection was Huntington Drive and Sunset Boulevard in Arcadia, with 13 injury collisions, followed by Brand Boulevard and Goode Avenue in Glendale with 12 and Corson and Marengo avenues in Pasadena with 10 accidents.
Auto Club officials say they cannot pinpoint what makes one intersection worse than another, but they said drivers tend to run red lights more frequently at or near freeway exits or entrances.
“Motorists could be taking on a freeway driving mentality before they actually reach the freeway, or keep driving like they’re on the freeway when they are exiting,” said Arline Dillman, the Auto Club’s chief traffic safety official.
Pasadena police say the city has reconfigured the traffic signals at the Walnut-Pasadena crossing to try to reduce the number of collisions.
“We had 18 collisions in 1998, 15 collisions last year and we’ve had 10 so far this year. We’re going in the right direction,” said Pasadena Police Lt. Rod Uyeda.
Uyeda said drivers heading east on Walnut would confuse two sets of traffic signals about 100 yards apart. One set of lights is at the intersection with Pasadena Avenue. Beyond it is another set at Corson Avenue, he said.
The signals have now been synchronized, Uyeda said.
Los Angeles had only one intersection among the worst 11 in the county for red-light runners. Flower and 11th streets in downtown Los Angeles was the scene of eight crashes in 1999 and ranked fifth, along with six other intersections.
The six intersections are: Cerritos’ Bloomfield Avenue and Artesia Freeway, Pasadena’s Green Street and Marengo Avenue, Pasadena’s Hill Avenue and Maple Street, Pomona’s Holt and White avenues, Torrance’s Hawthorne Boulevard and 190th Street and West Covina’s Cameron and Sunset avenues.
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e6b8f2b5a973b17f8c8e5b8434c96952 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-oct-15-bk-36804-story.html | Translating the Untranslatable | Translating the Untranslatable
Would we, if somehow this were possible, trade Anne Frank’s diary for her life, give up those salvaged pages to let her survive unscathed, in her 70s now? And would we forgo Charlotte Salomon’s “Life or Theater?”, her 1941 autobiography in 760 watercolors, if in exchange she were not to perish in Auschwitz? Would we, in effect, do without such indispensable human documents, relinquish them so as to secure the undeflected lives their creators might have lived?
Why yes! It goes without saying. But the question involves something more. We cherish these creators specifically because of the diary or the paintings that an atrocious history impelled them to create. Undo that history, rewind the reel, and Anne Frank and Charlotte Salomon would not be quite the persons we wish to redeem.
The same question holds for Paul Celan, although he did survive, in his way, the European Jewish catastrophe. Would that he had been spared affliction--the brutal loss of parents and homeland, the recrudescent neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism in postwar Germany where his poetry was destined, and a vicious plagiarism charge adding insult to injury. Yet Celan’s most compelling, inspiriting poems presuppose duress and distress. His body of writing belongs inseparably to its ground, its terrible cost. “For a poem is not timeless,” he said in 1958. “Certainly, it lays claim to infinity, it seeks to reach through time--through it [durch sie hindurch], not above and beyond it.”
Celan’s time saw him benignly situated at first, then vulnerable, wounded, unhealing. Born in 1920 to German-speaking Jewish parents in Czernowitz, the chief city of Bukovina and the eastern outpost of the Austrian empire, Celan (born Paul Antschel) grew up like so many other Jews, steeped in the songs and folk tales and classics of German culture. But Goethe and Schiller and Bach and Schubert and his German mother tongue formed no safeguard against what was to come. In 1933, not long before his bar mitzvah at age 13, the Nazis took power and Hitler’s harangues came over the radio to Czernowitz, which along with northern Bukovina had passed to Romania after the Great War.
Nonetheless Celan led his life. A comely, clever boy, an only child fervently attached to his mother, he moved from German to Hebrew to Romanian schools; and later, from a Zionist youth group to an anti-Fascist one whose magazine, “Red Student,” published Marxist texts. In 1936 he rallied to the Spanish republican cause, and always poetry possessed him: Rilke, Verlaine, Shakespeare, his own early Symbolist lyrics and efforts at translating from French, English, Romanian.
After the Hitler-Stalin pact, Soviet troops in 1940 occupied Czernowitz. Besides ridding Celan of any Communist certainties, their presence prompted him to begin learning Russian. Then on July 5, 1941, Einsatzkommando 10B entered his homeland. Avidly abetted by Romanian forces, the Germans set about destroying a centuries-old Jewish culture by plunder, burning, murder, the yellow star, ghetto, forced labor, deportation. In late June 1942, his parents were picked up in an overnight raid and sent over the Dniester and Bug rivers into Western Ukraine. Celan, away for the night, came home to find the door sealed--although friends of his underwent deportation and exile alongside their parents. He never recovered from that abrupt loss, however much his words, his voice, might probe it: “Taken off into / the terrain / with the unmistakable trace: / Grass, written asunder . . . / Read no more--look! / Look no more--go!”
From July 1942 through February 1944, Celan endured forced labor in Romanian camps. He kept a 3-inch by 4-inch leather notebook for poems, sending copies to a woman he loved back home and aiming distantly, desperately, for a book. Bit by bit he learned his parents’ fate: His father had perished from typhus, his mother was shot, some time in fall and winter 1942-'43.
Returning in the wake of the Red Army to his Soviet-occupied homeland in 1944, Celan took up life again, a raw orphan with literally nothing left but his mother tongue. Friends got him a job in a psychiatric hospital tending to Soviet airmen. In a little-known letter of July 1, 1944, he wrote to his Czernowitz boyhood friend Erich Einhorn (the word “Einhorn” appears in a later poem, “Shibboleth”), who’d fled to Russia in 1941 and not come back:
“Dear Erich,
“I’ve come to Kiev for two days (on official business) and I’m glad of the chance to write you a letter that will reach you quickly.
“Your parents are well, Erich, I talked with them before I came here. That’s saying a lot, Erich, you can’t imagine how much.
“My parents were shot by the Germans. In Krasnopolka on the Bug River.
“Erich, oh Erich.
“There’s much to tell. You’ve seen so much. I’ve experienced only humiliations and emptiness, endless emptiness. Maybe you can come home.”
More nakedly than Celan would later do, this letter expresses the unimaginable loss that grounds all his writing.
Paul’s friend Erich did not come home, and Czernowitz did not remain Celan’s home for long. Toward the war’s end he migrated to Bucharest, then in 1947 fled to Vienna. Finally in July 1948 he settled in Paris and lived the rest of his life there, marrying the graphic artist Gisele de Lestrange, having a son, Eric, in 1955, earning his livelihood as a German teacher at the Ecole Normale Superieure, a translator, a poet.
First-person lyrics such as “Black Flakes” and “Nearness of Graves,” from 1943, had attested his aching loss: “And can you bear, Mother, as once on a time, / the gentle, the German, the pain-laden rhyme?” Then in late 1944 and early ’45, with reports filtering through to Romania and the Polish camps disgorging (or not) their victims, Celan gave a voice to the common trauma:
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
Black milk, Schwarze Milch: How to find words for “that which happened,” as Celan called what we call Holocaust or Shoah; how to speak of and through the “thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech” in a mother tongue that had suddenly turned into his mother’s murderers’ tongue? The cadence and imagery of this ballad, which he named Todesfuge (“Deathfugue”), engage atrocity with art, as Celan would go on doing during the next quarter century. Though his rhythms might later compact or rupture, his words grow strange or few, from “Deathfugue” on Celan kept up the wrestle with language that makes him Europe’s leading postwar poet.
*
Testimony to how crucial, how necessary, are Paul Celan and his foremost poem comes from diverse sources across Europe and America. Nobel laureates Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass befriended and supported Celan. Philosophers Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jurgen Habermas acknowledged his singular importance, as did the French: Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida. Numerous German composers have set Todesfuge to music; its refrain Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland (“Death is a master from Germany”) has entitled various books and a major TV documentary; in 1988 on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a well-known actress recited Todesfuge in the Bundestag. Anselm Kiefer has inscribed phrases from the poem--dein goldenes Haar Margarete, dein aschenes Haar Sulamith--into some of his most unsettling canvases. The much-prized architect Daniel Libeskind built a Paul Celan Court into Berlin’s new Jewish Museum.
Fellow writers--and this is the acid test--acknowledge Celan’s vital presence for them. The brilliant Italian witness Primo Levi said about “Deathfugue”: “I carry it inside me like a graft.” And when I asked whether he’d taken Celan’s phrase “a grave in the air” for his book “If Not Now, When?”, Levi replied, “I ‘stole’ this image from Celan’s Todesfuge, which struck me deeply. . . . But, as you know, in literature the borderline between stealth and homage is blurred.”
Elie Wiesel ranks Celan among “the greatest and most moving Jewish poets of our turbulent time.” George Steiner sets him “at the summit of German (perhaps of modern European) poetry.” Among poets of the past, says Helen Vendler, Celan is our “greatest poet since Yeats,” while Harold Bloom calls him the “astonishing . . . Celan.” And no less tellingly, men and women from every walk of life, anywhere from Hurricane, West Virginia, to Thunder Bay, Ontario, have written or telephoned or e-mailed me over the years to say that Paul Celan’s writing touches them like no other: clears their vision, fires their hope, braces their pain.
Possibly the most decisive sign that Paul Celan matters essentially comes from the poets, in America and elsewhere. Former Poet Laureate Robert Hass, devoting two syndicated columns to Todesfuge and to my translation, called this “one of the most indelible poems of the 20th century.” For John Hollander, Celan is “genuinely great,” and for Denise Levertov, his work forms “at once so inward and such a quintessential artifact of history.” Poets as diverse as Adrienne Rich, Michael Palmer, Heather McHugh, Geoffrey Hill, Sharon Olds, Edward Hirsch, Eavan Boland, Rita Dove and many others all consider Celan a touchstone--for his life-and-death lyric seriousness, his uncompromising verbal honesty, and his courage in exposing his native German, driving language to the verge of unexpected revelation.
Paul Celan is both challenging and exemplary. There can have been only a few modern poets in whom the life and the work cleave so closely, so traumatically.
Just like the blood that bursts from
your eye or mouth or ear,
so your key changes,
he says to himself,
Just like the wind that rebuffs you,
packed round your word is the snow.
Je nach dem Wind der dich fortstosst,
ballt um das Wort sich der Schnee.
At one level, this stifled “word"--Celan’s Wort shut in between “packed” and “snow"--needs no biographical basis, any more than does Emily Dickinson’s mortal vision: “As freezing persons recollect the snow, / First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.” Yet what underlies those lines of Celan’s, that ars poetica, is the Ukrainian snow where his parents were murdered.
*
In August 1984 at Cerisy-la-Salle near the Norman coast, shortly after coming to know Gisele Celan-Lestrange, I asked her (in tentative French): “Is it not true that many of your husband’s poems arise from his own experience?” Cent pour cent, she replied instantly, “One hundred percent.” And yet at the same time, if I asked her about Paul Celan’s life, Gisele would urge me to concentrate strictly on his work. So that double focus, or call it a fusing of two lenses, forms the challenge of approaching Celan and of making his life’s work and his work’s life accessible.
To attend deeply to Paul Celan entails, as Gisele well knew, studying his own reading habits, since the world’s texts in many subjects and languages furnished realia for his writing. She let me peruse his two libraries, in Paris and Normandy. For hours on end I would pull volume after volume from the shelves, to see just what Celan had bought and read, and when and where, and whether he’d made marginal comments or underlinings. Once, for instance, I came upon a poem he’d drafted inside a physiology handbook; this, combined with his multiple markings of Gershom Scholem on the Shechinah, God’s radiant presence, guided my rendering of “Near, in the aorta’s arch.” I also found an offprint of Rene Char’s Resistance notebooks in Celan’s German translation. The Frenchman had inscribed it for his translator: A Paul Celan, a qui je pensais (“To Paul Celan, whom I was thinking of”)--an uncanny tribute!
Very late one cold night in November ’84 at the rue Montorgueil, after Gisele had gone to bed, I stayed up as long as I could, gripped by this silent private access to the poet’s mindwork. Spotting the soft chestnut covers of a frayed, hand-worn volume, I took it down: Kafka’s Erzahlungen. “A Country Doctor,” “The Hunter Gracchus,” “A Hunger Artist”: these stories had been much read. Then on looking into the book’s endpapers, I discovered that Celan had this volume with him during a months-long stay in a psychiatric clinic when nervous depression--"the doctor’s simplistic formula,” he said--was besetting him.
What took my breath away, in the back endpapers, were some terrifying pained scrawlings. Hardly daring to, I nevertheless copied them down: “early afternoon on the 8th of December 1965: It’s still quite clear in my head--Kamen Menschen, If only people would come, I could almost begin anew, ich konnte fast neu beginnen.” Along with this heart cry, on the last page I found, in Hebrew: shaddai shaddai, the ineffable name of God, and below that, in a distracted Hebrew hand, the Judaic watchword: Shema Yisrael Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One"--the essential profession of faith, which Jewish martyrs have recited over the centuries.
At this moment--3 a.m.? 4 a.m.?--Gisele happened to come into the living room. Seeing me with this Kafka volume, she asked me to put it back on the shelf. After seven more years of work--research, interviews, translations, conferences, essays--I doubted that I could, or rather that I should, publish those naked scrawlings, however arresting and revealing. Even when I’d finished composing my biographical account of Celan, I kept putting off asking Gisele for permission. Then, tragically and to my shock, in December 1991 she died of cancer. Fiercely serious about her own art, and loyal to her husband, she had embodied for me the presence of Paul Celan’s absence, and now her death deepened that absence.
Finally I decided that a genuine account needed to include Celan’s subjunctive Kamen Menschen, “If only people would come, I could almost begin anew,” and his Hebraic cry, “Hear, O Israel.” In 1994, 10 years after lighting upon them, I asked the Celans’ son, Eric, for permission and he kindly agreed. These utterances belong to the poet’s psychic ground, the dark behind the mirror. What’s more, in the critical languages of German and Hebrew, they speak for two core motives, the motives that--to my mind, at least--unite in driving Paul Celan’s most idiosyncratic writing: Kamen Menschen, an uncertain yet urgent hope for human addressability, humane solidarity; and Shema Yisrael, a radical imperative--"Listen!"--in the other language that remained “near and not lost,” nah und unverloren, “in the midst of the losses,” as he said in his first major speech, on receiving the Bremen literature prize in 1958.
There he spoke his hope: “A poem . . . can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the--not always greatly hopeful--belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps.” Certainly Celan’s reader, likewise his translator, can try to inhabit that heartland of intimate appeal.
“Everything is near and unforgotten,” Celan wrote in 1944 to Erich Einhorn, meaning the arc of a life, from youth into war and beyond, that might have incurred oblivion. Thus, his life’s work, the poems and prose and certain translations, form a continuum in which everything is indeed near and unforgotten. It may help to see Celan’s oeuvre evolving from early to middle to late: from 1920 until the summer of 1948, when the State of Israel came into being and when instead of moving there he settled in Paris, “one of the last who must live out to the end the destiny of the Jewish spirit in Europe”; then from 1948, when he took up his living as a poet, translator, and teacher, until late 1962, the completion of “The No-One’s-Rose” and his first bout of severe depression; and from 1962, when his poetry was turning spare and dark, until his death in 1970.
Celan closed the 1958 Bremen speech by calling himself one who “goes toward language with his very being, stricken by and seeking reality.” Though my last phrase does not quite catch the German’s ultimate stresses--wirklichkeitswund und Wirklichkeit suchend, “reality-wounded and Reality-seeking,” perhaps that closing phrase can chart Paul Celan’s poetic phases, a kind of tensile arc: “Stricken . . . Seeking . . . Reality.”
Such an arc traverses the entire body of Celan’s writing, represented in English translation more fully in my forthcoming anthology, “Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan,” than ever before--161 poems, plus much else that also manifests the poet’s driving concerns. This anthology opens with his youthful lyrics, scarcely translated until now. Then come chronological selections from the eight books published between 1952 and 1971, and from a further gathering issued after his death. And then follow several poems he never published, found in his private papers. My anthology also presents Celan’s major prose, setting it for the first time alongside his poems in translation. These highly unusual prose writings interact with his poetry: the whimsical “Conversation in the Mountains,” where Jew Gross and Jew Klein talk about alienation, nature, silence, God, and language itself; Celan’s speeches for the Bremen and Buchner prizes, which identify subtly and sharply the state of poetry after “that which happened”; and his half-elated, half-vulnerable words to the Hebrew Writers Association in 1969, shortly before his death.
Also included are photographic reproductions of little-known or hitherto unknown Celan manuscripts, along with Gisele Celan-Lestrange’s graphic art, which accompanied and fortified his own art. As a whole, the anthology reveals someone whose language carved “a Breathcrystal, / your unannullable / witness.”
In making these translations, I’ve consulted the multiple drafts of Celan’s poems as well as his notes for the Buchner or “Meridian” speech, all of which expose his shaping process, helping reader and translator alike to come closer to the poet’s intentions. I’ve also listened over and over to recordings of his voice, so as to absorb whatever emphases, rhythmic above all, might aid my task. Even the moments when Celan misspeaks a line (as in Todestuge and “Mit wechselndem Schlussel”), utterly rare in so exacting a poet, may possibly open an insight into something crucial happening there. And another unique window on Celan’s poetic intentions has become accessible. In 1955 two translators made French versions from his work, and he carefully revised them. Given his nuanced, exact French, these amendations help clarify obscure and enigmatic and ambiguous moments in his German verse. For instance, his poem “Shibboleth” evokes the 1934 workers’ uprisings in Vienna and Madrid as Zwillingsrote. Originally I rendered that as “twin rednesses”; but since Celan in French suggested rougeoiements, I’ve now opted for “reddenings,” which deepens the political image with a sense of dawning. Or in “Praise of Distance,” the speaker is “a heart that abode among Menschen”: the French translator heard this as hommes, “men,” but Celan made it humains, a heart among humans. In the same poem, he replaced infidele (unfaithful) with the stronger Apostat, so that the line says “Apostate only am I faithful"--which would provide, by the way, a stimulating but risky motto for translation itself.
Of course there remains one element of Paul Celan’s career that cannot figure in a Selected Poems and Prose: namely, his genius as a translator into German. From his teenage years (when he tried Apollinaire, Eluard, Shakespeare, Yeats, Housman, and Sergei Esenin), through the ghetto and forced labor, into his working life where translation also supplemented a teaching income, and up until his death, for Celan the rendering of other poets into German was an essential activity. “All these are encounters,” he said, using the word Begegnung, which to him meant spiritual recognition; “here too I have gone with my very being toward language.” Sometimes translation provided a proving ground, as when he fashioned more than 500 rhymed German alexandrines for Paul Valery’s La Jeune Parque because Rilke had said it couldn’t be done.
At his most fervent, Celan translated in order to probe the limits of postwar German and to chisel his own truths out of the refractory stone of an other tongue. “I consider translating Mandelshtam into German,” he said, “to be as important a task as my own verses.” Osip Mandelshtam, to be sure, had perished as poet and Jew--had even (Celan believed for a while) died at Nazi rather than Soviet hands. Yet it did not take that sort of blood brotherhood to evoke penetrating translations. Shakespeare’s charged language and themes of time, loss, death, regeneration, as well as of betrayal and bitterness, provoked German versions that appropriate and even sharpen the sonnets.
In Emily Dickinson, vastly removed though she was, Celan found kindred voicings of mortality and theological skepticism:
I reason, we could die--
The best Vitality
Cannot excel decay,
But, what of that?
Where Dickinson already seems compact and direct, her translator, while keeping meter and slant rhymes, compresses still more and mutates her grammar:
Ich denk: Sieh zu, man stirbt,
der Saft, der in dir wirkt,
auch ihm gilt dies: Verdirb--
ja und?
(I think: Look here, we die,
the sap that works in thee,
it too knows this: Decay--
so what?)
Conditional turns into imperative, abstract into concrete, irony into sarcasm.
Because the inquiring, illumining process of translation taught me so much in my book “Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu” (1980), later I thought my work on Paul Celan might be entitled “Translating Celan: The Strain of Jewishness"--but that smacked a little too much of a mere sequel. Still, “Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew” (1995) took its interpretive energy partly from the translator’s point of vantage and disadvantage. Now it feels inevitable to follow that account of Celan’s life work with a gathering of his writings, in German and in English translation.
All too often, it goes without saying that any translator is indebted to those who have come before--in my case, to the pathbreaking Celan translators Christopher Middleton and especially Michael Hamburger, to Jerome Rothenberg, Cid Corman, Joachim Neugroschel. More recently, I’ve also benefited from the work of Pierre Joris, Heather McHugh and Nikolai Popov. *
For my anthology I’ve revised almost all the poems quoted fully in my biography of Celan, and completed scores of others cited there only in part; and I’ve added 50 more poems to represent him as broadly as possible. Several poems that I’d bypassed as too enigmatic or elusive for discussion, such as “Streak,” “Dew,” “Black,” and “King’s rage,” I’ve now translated anyway. Sometimes it’s true, as per Franz Rosenzweig bringing Judah Halevi from Hebrew into German: “I myself fully understand a poem only when I have translated it.” But not always. Now, with inscrutable poems or lines, I gladly pass them along to the reader within the full stream of Celan’s writing. After all, Celan himself in his recitals refrained utterly from comment, enunciating only the poem’s words and lines. His voice was intense, precise, sometimes monotone, grave yet resonant, registering nuance and emotion without excess.
Mostly Celan’s lyrics will reach readers who keep their minds peeled, without the sort of interpreting my critical biography offers. I do, though, furnish factual notes for this anthology. With a poem such as “‘Just Think,” responding to Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War, it helps to recall the Peat-Bog Soldiers from an early concentration camp protest song, and to recognize Masada, where Jewish zealots held out against Roman siege, then took their own lives rather than surrender. It would also have helped, when Celan tells this poem’s addressees du / erstarkst und / erstarkst, if I’d originally translated it (as I now do) “you / go from strength / to strength,” echoing Psalm 84.
*
One hears many metaphors for literary and especially poetic translation, most of them pejorative: kissing a bride through her veil; les belles infideles (women beautiful hence unfaithful); the wrong side of a Persian carpet, its design blurred by extra threads; traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor); “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Yet some of the hopeful things Celan himself said about poetry, and about love, offer acute figures for translation: “I see no essential difference between a poem and a handshake”; “a poem can be a message in a bottle”; true poems are “making toward something . . . perhaps toward an addressable Thou”; “the poem wants to reach an Other, it needs this Other, it needs an Over-Against.” In an early love poem, Celan might also be heard to speak for idiosyncratic translation as strongly as Robert Lowell did: Ich bin du, wenn ich ich bin, “I am you when I am I” (or “when I I am”!). And a later poem lets the word for “translate,” ubersetzen, suggest that trauma will inevitably carry over into the process of translation: a ferryboat “bears / wounded readings across,” sie setzt / Wundgelesenes uber.
Celan’s poem “Everything is different” (1962) imagines an encounter with Mandelshtam in which, dismembering and remembering, the act of translation could not get much more drastic:
the name Osip comes toward you, you tell him
what he already knows, he takes it, he takes it off you with hands,
* Needless to say, because a Celan poem admits of, and indeed often calls for, variant readings, these will show up in variant translations as well. Surely some misreadings and outright mistakes have also entered my versions. I would welcome correction.
you loose the arm from his shoulder, the right one, the left,
you fasten your own in their place . . .
--what ripped apart, grows back together--
Although well shy of anything like Celan’s possessings, my own translating practice has occasionally taken small permissions from his. As a rule, I attempt to be literal yet idiomatic, faithful yet fresh--the rub coming in that word “yet.” For Celan as translator, faithful often did mean fresh. Vis-a-vis French or Russian or English verse, he was given to fracturing, contracting, omitting, specifying, intensifying, inventing, repeating where the original had no repetition, changing nouns into verbs, indicatives into imperatives or gerunds, and so on.
Now this free hand is not for lesser spirits. Sometimes, though, small touches or tunings seem right: a biblical or Buber-esque “Thou” rather than “you,” even though German Du is merely the second-person singular that English has lost; a capital letter when context dictates--"come with me to Breath / and beyond"--though German nouns take capitals regularly; an opting for neologism--"Deathfugue"--though German compounds its words habitually; and a version a la Emily Dickinson for Celan’s musing on his mother, So bist du denn geworden: “So you are turned--a Someone / As I had never known.”
Too easily, I believe, lyric poetry gets labeled untranslatable, especially in the case of someone whose personal losses rendered his German language at once precarious and privileged, inalienable yet irreplicable; someone calling himself “whitegravel stutterer”; someone speaking from his “true- / stammered mouth” about “eternity / bloodblack embabeled,” blutschwarz umbabelt. But then why not think of translation as the specific art of loss, and begin from there?
“Todtnauberg” (1967), marking his encounter with the philosopher who decided that “Being speaks German,” depicts Celan with Martin Heidegger in the Black Forest (for this anthology I provide the version Celan sent to Heidegger; later he deleted ungesaumt, “undelayed”). Signing a guest book, the poet wonders,
--wessen Namen nahms auf
vor dem meinen?--
--whose name did it receive
before mine?--
But instead of “receive” for aufnehmen, perhaps an ambiguous “take in"--given the philosopher’s unacknowledged, unrecanted Hitlerite phase--would make more sense. Such moments in the translator’s constant struggle for idiomatic equivalence indicate a possible exchange between loss and gain. For example, Celan’s Van Gogh vignette, “Below a Painting” (1955), begins,
Corn wave swarming with ravens.
Which heaven’s blue? Below? Above?
Then it ends,
Starkres Schwirren. Nah’res Gluhen. Beide Welten.
Stronger whirring. Nearer glowing. Both worlds.
This does catch Celan’s strong cadence, but then botches the last phrase, which wants the same four-syllable on-off beat as Beide Welten: not exactly “Both of these worlds,” but maybe “Two worlds touching"--or does that add too much?
A certain elation occurs now and then when a translation comes into touch with its original by finding its own rightness. Such elation, inherent to any creative effort, strikes me as slightly suspect, especially touching Paul Celan’s “pain-laden” German poems. Unless, perhaps, a la Walter Benjamin, those poems somehow require translation, because they are “making toward . . . something standing open,” as Celan put it, “toward an addressable reality.” Benjamin said: “Translation takes fire from the endless renewal of languages as they grow to the messianic end of their history.”
Paul Celan’s poems are astir, albeit thwartedly, with that messianic impulse. Having ventured to Israel in 1969 for the first time, decades later than many compatriots did and he himself possibly should have, Celan wrote a spate of “Jerusalem” lyrics, some elated, some despairing. While there he walked around the Old City, recently liberated in the 1967 Six-Day War, and saw the Temple Mount’s Western Wall. One poem speaks of a Posaunenstelle, a “trumpet place” or “shofar place / deep in the glowing / text-void,” and closes with self-admonition:
hor dich ein
mit dem Mund.
Literally, “hear yourself in / with the mouth.” That glowing “text-void,” Leertext, also puns on Lehrtext, “teaching-" or “Torah-text.” By holding onto Celan’s punctual three-beat utterance, hor dich ein, as in the shofar’s New Year blast te-ki-ah, and letting dich deepen the attentiveness called for here, possibly these lines can say
hear deep in
with your mouth.
What the poet requires of himself--namely, a voice responding to the text-void after “that which happened"--he asks of his translators and readers alike.
*
On April 13, 1970, Celan began a poem about the generation of poetry and its listener:
Vinegrowers dig up
the dark-houred clock,
deep upon deep,
you read,
Du liest can also mean “you glean” or “gather.” The poem ends by speaking of “Open ones,” those now free, in the open, who “carry / the stone behind their eye.” Whatever this stone embodies--a blindness or a muteness, paradoxically enabling both vision and speech--
it knows you,
on the Sabbath.
der erkennt dich,
am Sabbath.
This was Celan’s last poem. A week later, possibly suffering another depression and dreading the medical treatment for these incurable wounds, he disappeared into the Seine River late at night and drowned himself, unobserved. His closing word, “Sabbath,” bespeaks rest and refreshment, anticipating redemption. So possibly Paul Celan’s final line, am Sabbath, can take a slight spur in translation, a rousing of that stone behind the eye:
it knows you,
come the Sabbath.
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13d2cb8bb5429f2179fc7f19608a59c3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-oct-16-cl-37098-story.html | Trading Sex for a Minivan? Hey, Whatever Revs Your Engine | Trading Sex for a Minivan? Hey, Whatever Revs Your Engine
The husband had always made it painfully clear that he couldn’t stand the female half of a couple he and his wife were to dine with. His wife couldn’t bear the idea that her husband might be rude to the woman, who had traveled from Europe with her spouse for a visit. So the wife promised her husband a valued sexual favor at the end of the evening if he would only be pleasant to the woman he so loathed.
“He was over-the-top nice to her,” recounted the 40-year-old wife, who lives in Santa Ana and asked that her name not be
used. “All night this woman kept saying to me ‘I always thought he hated me, but now I feel differently.’ If I really want something from him, I can get it if I promise sex.”
The exchange of sex for things desired, whether it is good behavior, a new car or takeout dinner of one cuisine over another, is one of the oldest games played out between the sexes. But it is a game in which women have the upper hand--even in relationships where sex is frequent and satisfying, even when women have economic parity with their mates and even when women have their own lusty sex drives.
“Women do it all the time,” said Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “Women will make love to a man to appease him even when she is tired. The exchange of sex for resources is older than humanity.”
“It works for me because my husband loves sex so much that I usually get what I want,” said a 29-year-old Santa Monica mother of two. She said she has bartered sexual favors to get a sewing machine and a minivan.
And if she doesn’t deliver, she said, her husband will say to her, only half in jest, “Hey, you got what you wanted. Where is my half of the deal?”
Sexual quid pro quo works for more mundane items, too.
“I definitely barter with sex,” said a happily married woman and mother of two who works as a hotel concierge. “I will ask my husband to go the grocery store. Or I will say, ‘C’mon, let’s get Italian takeout’ which he doesn’t really like. He will say, ‘No, no, no.’ ” But as soon as she offers a sexual favor, she said, all he wants to know is whether she wants her pizza plain or with pepperoni.
Relationship experts say that if sex can only happen in the context of bargain, then it is unhealthy. Bartering with sex can be playful, titillating and seductive, but only if the sex is not denigrating. Couples who barter with sex probably have a robust sexual bond and a good sense of humor, said Gina Ogden, a licensed marriage and family therapist practicing in Cambridge.
“It requires easy communication between lovers,” said Ogden. “They have to have a good feeling about their sex life. It doesn’t matter that much about the outcome, although if she never comes through, it becomes a tease. But it is more about the excitement, anticipation, humor and sometimes the juxtaposition of a really straight-laced task next to something sexual.”
Is there an amorous offer a man can make a woman to get her to, say, change the oil in his car?
“My husband wants it all the time,” said the Santa Monica wife. “So I don’t have to do anything for a sexual favor.”
*
Birds & Bees is a weekly column on relationships and sexuality. Kathleen Kelleher can be reached at kellehr@gte.net.
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4cfc18a61708fe4bcb71805497ea1e63 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-oct-19-fi-38718-story.html | Nobel Prize Inflation Hits University of Chicago | Nobel Prize Inflation Hits University of Chicago
Fuzzy math appears to have infiltrated the counting of Nobel prizes as well as the presidential campaign.
When University of Chicago professor James J. Heckman won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science last week, his university was quick to proclaim that Heckman was the institution’s 72nd Nobel laureate.
Though the University of Chicago is noted for its number of Nobel winners, it turns out to use a counting method that might not pass the rigors of its well-regarded economics department.
Just 17 Nobel laureates received their prizes while members of the university’s faculty. The remainder were students, faculty or researchers at the University of Chicago at some point in their careers--though not necessarily when they won the prize, or when they did the research that won them the award.
“It’s not the most modest way to count Nobels,” said Paul Samuelson, a Nobel laureate and economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. Samuelson is claimed by both MIT and the University of Chicago, where Samuelson earned his undergraduate degree. Heckman shared the prize last week with UC Berkeley’s Daniel L. McFadden for their work on “theory and methods widely used in the statistical analysis of individual and household behavior.”
Berkeley credited itself for 17 prizes. But it uses a more conservative counting method, crediting itself for a Nobel only when one of its faculty members or emeritus faculty members wins, according to Janet Gilmore, a UC Berkeley spokeswoman.
If it used the University of Chicago method, Berkeley would at least double its tally.
University of Chicago officials are unapologetic about trumpeting their Nobel links, pointing out they never claimed to have 72 professors win the coveted award. The university even sells a shirt listing all 70-plus Nobel laureates.
Their “official” list of prize winners includes Kenneth Arrow, who won the economics prize in 1972 while at Harvard. He taught for one year--1948-49--at the University of Chicago. He spent the next 19 years at Stanford University, before heading to Harvard.
“There are a lot of ways to count. As long as you are consistent, that is the key,” said Larry Arbeiter, the University of Chicago official who tracks the prizes.
“As long as we are clear about the criteria, there is room for multiple claims.”
The University of Chicago is not alone in Nobel inflation.
Cambridge University in England, which also uses the most liberal of counting methods, credits itself with more Nobels than the University of Chicago--74.
“The Harvard figure is somewhere around 40 but that includes Henry Kissinger, who won the Nobel Prize for peace when he was secretary of State and who never returned to Harvard,” said Dale Jorgenson, a Harvard University economist and member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobels.
Jorgenson said there are no “hard and fast rules” to Nobel counting. The University of Chicago is the most aggressive counter, Berkeley is on the conservative side and Harvard is in the middle, he said.
Indeed, the number of Nobel laureates claimed by universities is probably greater than the actual number of awards made since the first prize in 1901. The awards were the idea of Swedish industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896.
Nobel counting gets even more confusing when a professor wins for work done over a long career at several institutions. McFadden, for example, joined Berkeley in 1963, but left for a 13-year stint at MIT in 1978, before returning to Berkeley, where he now teaches.
Earlier this week, it looked as if even the University of Chicago had its limits. As of Wednesday, the university had yet to list McFadden as one of its winners. McFadden was a visiting professor there in 1967. But when he learned of the omission Wednesday, Arbeiter said the university would add McFadden.
“That leaves us only one behind Cambridge,” Arbeiter said.
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6a841067cb054e497a0ff949246a4a0f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-oct-25-cl-41457-story.html | Upward and Onward Toward Book Seven -- Her Way | Upward and Onward Toward Book Seven -- Her Way
Last week, sales of the four “Harry Potter” books hit 43 million. Already No. 1 on every major bestseller list, the newest title, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” also is history’s fastest-selling book. Warner Bros. is preparing a “Harry Potter” film, cast with unknowns. Potterisms, terms found only in these volumes, have entered the broad vernacular. (Don’t stand for it if someone likens you to Draco Malfoy.) High on the list of hot kiddie collectibles this season are Hogwarts journals and lightning bolt ink stamps. Look outside on Halloween and you will see numerous children with round eyeglasses, hoping to play Quidditch with their brooms.
No longer a mere literary hero, the wizard-in-training is a commercial typhoon. So if you happen to be having tea with J.K. Rowling, perpetrator of this astonishing phenomenon, it might be reasonable to inquire: Will success spoil Harry Potter?
Absolutely not, insists Rowling, who is just this side of obsessive about the boy who appeared to her fully formed on a train ride between London and Manchester. (Religious allegorists take note: Few other epiphanies have proved so profitable.) In a clingy purple dress and heels that look like upside-down skyscrapers, Rowling is fierce about her young wizard and the grand themes around him.
“I have known Harry, and I have been writing about Harry for 10 years,” Rowling said. “He is very, very real to me.”
On a quick visit from Scotland last week, Rowling, 35, sipped tea and ignored a plate of tidy little sandwiches. Her readers know her as J.K., but friends call her Jo, short for Joanne. Rowling was so grateful five years ago when Bloomsbury Press paid about $4,000 for her first book, “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” as the first book is known in Great Britain (“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” in this country) that she didn’t protest the decision to use genderless initials instead of an identifiably female first name. More boy-friendly, they told her.
Rowling said she sees it as her mission to convey the life story of the boy named for a family she grew up with on the English border with Wales. Harry Potter’s saga is so complete that Rowling sees the tale as one gigantic story broken into seven books “I think I’m quite driven on this,” Rowling said on a busy afternoon of engagements scheduled by her U.S. publisher, Scholastic. “I want to get this story out of me. It’s that simple. There’s no other reason to keep writing.”
As if she were Harry’s guardian--not the awful Dursleys of her story--Rowling talks fast and furiously about the boy with the lightning bolt scar. She laughs readily, and at her own expense, agreeing, for example, that maybe it was a little presumptuous for an unpublished author to set forth on a seven-volume serial novel. “My response is, you can be as arrogant as you want when you haven’t done anything,” Rowling said. “What the hell do you have to lose?”
Thanks to Harry Potter, what Rowling has gained is an enormous fortune. She and her daughter, Jessica, now 7, own a secluded home in Edinburgh. For the first time in her life, she has enough disposable income to purchase anything she wants--such as the glittering ring she spotted in a jewelry store window not long ago, and marched right in and bought.
But Rowling dismisses reports that Harry has made her the third-highest-paid woman in Great Britain. “Not true,” she said. A recent British newspaper report that she makes 56,000 pounds a day is just plain hilarious, Rowling said, adding, “If that’s true, my banker should call me and say where is it?”
Slender and animated, Rowling is passionate and intense when she talks about Harry. When the pair met, so to speak, Rowling was 25. By the time she put his story to paper, she was divorced. She was so poor that she could barely afford to heat her apartment, so she wrote at an Edinburgh coffee house, pushing her daughter’s pram with one hand and composing prose with the other. A congenital introvert, Rowling still writes her first drafts in longhand, with final edits on a computer. In fact, she said, “the place I am most comfortable on Earth is sitting when I am writing.”
Filled with symbols and archetypes, the “Harry Potter” series is really one giant fairy tale. But only Rowling knows the ending. She writes with relentless self-criticism.
“One of my strengths, I think, is that I am able to know when I haven’t done my best,” Rowling said. “I think I’m generally able to see where I fall short.” Before the Potter apparition, she nearly finished two novels for adults but had the good sense to stop while she was behind. “If either one had been published, if some editor had had some sort of death wish,” Rowling said, “I think I’d be sitting here feeling very apologetic.”
With Harry, Rowling said she knew right away. She knew the orphan wizard would be her ticket out of literary obscurity, and she knew the story would take off, the way Harry travels by stepping through walls and then vaulting through space. “I just really believed in it,” she said. “And it was fun. It was fun to write. I had this strong feeling that this was the one.”
Harry was born as an 11-year-old, and Rowling said she knew immediately that her job was to get him through the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. So while she was developing the plot from beginning to end, she also was deciding how long it takes to become a wizard. “Seven is a magical number, a mystical number,” Rowling said. “And it turned out I could do it in seven books. I really see these books as just like one huge novel that I’ve divided up.” With four “Harry Potter” books out, she says, “I feel like I’ve done half of my novel.”
(For those awaiting the fifth installment, keep waiting. The heft of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” and the time it took to write the book surprised even Rowling. All she will say is that the fifth book will not be out as soon as her fans would like.)
Rowling bristles at comparisons--especially between Harry Potter and Peter Pan. Of J.M. Barrie’s novel about a little boy who refuses to grow up, she said, “I find it a sinister idea. I find it stunted. I wouldn’t want to go back to childhood. I’ve gotten much happier as I’ve gotten older. That’s true of most of the women I know, not necessarily of the men I know. It’s my feeling that men in general hanker after childhood much more than women.”
Her own books, said Rowling, “are written to please me, and I am clearly an adult. I don’t write what I think 8-year-olds would find funny. I write what I would find funny.” Maybe this explains why so many adults--among them, suspense writer Stephen King--have devoured her books, which in England are published with two covers, one for grown-ups and one for children. And if sometimes she writes above the heads of her young readers, Rowling reasons, “If they love them enough, they’ll reread them. And then it will be like finding another sweet in the bag.”
Characters Sometimes Surprise the Author
Sometimes, Rowling said, Harry and his merry band of mystical rogues do naughty things that surprise even her. (She is too protective of her story line to disclose when this has happened.) But, she said, “they’re not allowed to surprise me too much. They’re allowed to give me the odd surprise chapter now and again, and that’s it.”
As her hero ascended to cult status, Rowling was flattered--both for her and for Harry. Sometimes it all has an aura of unreality about it, like an out-of-body experience, Rowling said. “There’s part of me just sitting over in the corner giggling,” she said. “I hope it doesn’t wear off.”
Rowling is charmed that her characters have assumed such force for so many people and amused by the convoluted questions often popped at her. Recently she was asked why Harry’s cousin, Dudley Dursley, was so fat. Rowling laughed. “I was told it would be politically incorrect to have a child so large,” she said. “My response was that this was about abuse. It was abusive that the people around him are feeding him not only with their putrid ideas, but with food, like a goose. He’s a victim of his parents.”
It seemed superfluous to Rowling to mention that she was describing a fictional family: Muggles (non-wizards) who grudgingly watch over Harry when he is not at Hogwarts. Thanks to the Dursleys, “Muggles” has become a workplace pejorative, the Wall Street Journal reported recently.
Then there are the readers who take it upon themselves to advise Rowling about her upcoming installments. Don’t kill off any more characters, some parents railed after book four. They told Rowling: To my children, your books are a safe place in a scary world.
Rowling’s reply: “I have to write what I have to write. I’m not taking dictation. It’s like Louisa May Alcott. Would you have written to Alcott and said, ‘Beth can’t die’? Beth had to die.”
Still, the themes of death and bereavement linger over all the “Harry Potter” books. The question, Rowling allows, is what does death mean to the people who have gone, and to the ones who are left? But whether this motif traces to Rowling’s own grief over the death of her mother at age 45 is something she does not discuss. Nor will she expand on the overarching moral of the books. “If I did say, I’d be giving myself away about book seven,” she said.
But she will say that the themes of good and evil, power and the abuse of power, hatred and forgiveness also thread their way through these books.
There is also the less cosmic matter of adolescent development. Harry and his best wizard friend, Ron, were easy to write about, Rowling said: “I learned about boys because of the men I knew. It’s true. Anyway, I like teenage boys. They’re funny.” And Rowling loves fellow Hogwarts student Hermione, her central female character. “She’s very much like me when I was younger,” Rowling said. “I just love her bossiness and her control-freakiness.”
For Rowling, when the time comes to let go, when book seven casts its final spell, she knows she will cry--"I will sob my eyes off"--and yet she will be, in a way, relieved.
“I will never write anything this popular again,” she said. “How could I? Even if I write 100 novels after ‘Harry Potter,’ I will always be ‘J.K. Rowling, creator of “Harry Potter.” ’ “
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c60b0a4a5a5e18f231153746f7c63ae1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-oct-27-me-42959-story.html | Lake Casitas Angler Landed Whale of a Find | Lake Casitas Angler Landed Whale of a Find
Aaron Plunkett went out for a January day of angling at Lake Casitas, and though it wasn’t a particularly good day for fish, the Ojai resident came home with a monumental catch: a 25-million-year-old whale.
It was a find--a few pieces of fossilized bones--that has the experts excited. They’re convinced that what Plunkett stumbled over is a first of its kind in California: a toothed baleen whale, representing a rare evolutionary link between whales as we know them, with their brushy, plankton-catching plates, and their ancient, toothy ancestors.
“He has in fact found a very important specimen,” said Larry Barnes, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History.
What Plunkett found is a whale dating from the earliest part of the Miocene Epoch, and one of the last of the toothed baleens to survive past the Oligocene Epoch. It’s a fossil that until now has mostly only been seen in such areas as the Pacific Northwest, Baja California and Japan.
For now, no one is exactly advertising the precise location of the bones at Lake Casitas, where they have remained in the same place since the whale died and was covered in ancient ocean sediment back when Ojai was under water.
Plunkett couldn’t be reached Thursday, and by all accounts is very protective of his fossil find. In a short, written statement, the self-professed musical anthropologist said he hoped to create an ambitious Ojai learning center to house the skeletal remains and offer “instruction, public performances, history through storytelling, promotion of anthropological art forms and the like.”
“I feel it appropriate for the whale to remain in the Ojai Valley,” Plunkett said in the statement.
That’s not likely to happen, said Howell Thomas, a paleontologist with the natural history museum. Thomas said he is hoping to dig up the entire skeleton later, once the museum is able to draw up a budget for digging and cleaning. If anything, the museum will provide a replica to Plunkett for his wished-for interpretive museum.
Doug Ralph, director of the Lake Casitas Recreation Area, was willing to give some publicity to the find. But Ralph said he would like the excavation to occur quickly for fear scavengers might come back to search for the remaining 25 to 30 feet of whale body buried next to the lake. Legally, the recreation area owns the bones, but Ralph said he’ll leave the excavation up to the natural history museum.
“We’re looking at this as something out of the realm of what we can do, and [in the realm of] what the L.A. museum can do,” he said.
But the marketing opportunities aren’t lost on him.
“Now, we can claim Casitas has a whale of a fish,” Ralph said.
Plunkett stumbled across the bones Jan. 19. Sensing they were important, he brought them to the attention of Thomas, who specializes in marine mammals. Thomas brought back parts of the skull, a tooth and some vertebrae to the museum.
Thomas said he and his crew also discovered the bodies of smaller whales and a starfish, all from the same period. Just a month ago the museum was alerted to another small whale of the same period in Matilija Canyon, just north of the Casitas site.
Experts on the toothed baleen whales say only now are discoveries of the whales picking up. Thirty years ago scientists didn’t know that evidence of an ancient baleen--the bristly filter that whales use to suck in small fish--could be found by looking for tell-tale grooves on fossilized palate bones.
“It sounds counterintuitive to have a baleen whale that has teeth,” said Hans Thewissen, a whale expert and anatomy teacher at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine. “They were in the process of losing their teeth, and the baleen doesn’t fossilize.”
In the northwest United States, where many of North America’s whale fossils have been found, scientists have had a hard time studying them because they are often in hard rock. But some of that material is now being examined, according to Bruce Crowley, a paleontologist at the Burke Museum in Seattle.
But, paleontologists here say it was only a matter of time before someone stumbled across such a find. It helped that Plunkett had an inkling of what he had found.
“Ain’t nature grand?” asked Dave Whistler, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the natural history museum. “We know they’re out there falling out of rocks all the time. We’re dependent on the goodwill of the general public.”
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0466c41c29498446963c86b69a404848 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-03-me-14716-story.html | A Wrong Turn Led to Ted Bundy’s Twisted Road to Justice | A Wrong Turn Led to Ted Bundy’s Twisted Road to Justice
The patrol car’s headlights drowned the Volkswagen Beetle in light, and the officer trained his gun on a shaggy-haired suspect in a black turtleneck.
“I didn’t want to shoot the guy,” said highway patrol Sgt. Bob Hayward. “I wish I had.”
Hayward didn’t know he had collared America’s most notorious serial killer. By then, Theodore Bundy had already killed at least 25 young women in four states, preying on good girls from average households.
“Back in 1974, everybody’s daughter was getting killed,” said Robert Keppel, a lead Bundy investigator in Washington.
Hayward was sitting in his cruiser outside his home at 3 a.m. on Aug. 16, 1975, finishing a shift log, when he noticed the tan Volkswagen drive by. Minutes later, his radio crackled with a call for assistance and Hayward responded.
He took a wrong turn leaving the subdivision and stumbled on the VW parked in front of a neighbor’s home. Hayward knew the owners were on vacation and their teenage daughters were home alone.
When Hayward’s lights hit the car, it fled, careening through the neighborhood and barreling onto a main road before pulling into an abandoned gas station. Hayward was close behind, his gun drawn.
“I’m lost,” Bundy said, his hands raised. He said he had been at the drive-in, watching “Towering Inferno.” But Hayward knew that movie wasn’t playing.
Hayward searched the car and found pantyhose, a ski mask, a crowbar, an ice pick and handcuffs.
*
By August 1975, the county homicide team had already spent months struggling with the disappearances of three 17-year-old girls.
There was Melissa Smith, who vanished from a shopping mall and was found dead in the woods, and Laura Aime, who left a Halloween party to buy cigarettes and turned up frozen a month later in Provo Canyon.
And then on Nov. 8, 1974, Debi Kent vanished after leaving a school play to pick up her 11-year-old brother at a roller rink.
In the high school parking lot, investigators found a key to the disappearances--literally. The key matched a set of handcuffs someone had used to try to kidnap 19-year-old Carol DaRonch earlier in the day.
DaRonch was shopping at the same mall Smith had been at when a handsome young man posing as a police officer told DaRonch her car had been broken into and she needed to go with him.
They climbed into a tan Volkswagen, and within moments he had slapped the handcuffs on her wrist. She leaped from the car and grappled with Bundy before breaking free and flagging down a passing car.
“I knew he was going to kill me and nobody was ever going to know what happened to me,” DaRonch recently told the makers of a Court TV cable television documentary called “Crime Stories.”
*
When Sheriff Pete Hayward told his detectives that his brother Bob had arrested Bundy, the tan Volkswagen set off alarm bells for detectives Ben Forbes and Jerry Thompson. So did the name Bundy.
A year earlier, Bundy’s girlfriend, the daughter of a Utah doctor, had called Seattle investigators to report his suspicious behavior. She later demanded they send his name to Salt Lake.
When Hayward arrested Bundy, Utah investigators called Washington--where 10 women had disappeared. Washington investigators had narrowed their list of suspects to 25--and Ted Bundy was on it. Now Keppel thought he had his man.
“It was like a whole euphoric situation when that call came in,” said Keppel.
The Washington murders had stopped after the summer of 1974--just when Bundy moved to Salt Lake City to study law at the University of Utah.
He didn’t seem like a serial killer. He was a handsome young man, an up-and-comer who worked on a Washington gubernatorial campaign.
But two weeks after he arrived, a 17-year-old cheerleader named Nancy Wilcox disappeared after last being seen in a light-colored Volkswagen Beetle. Then Smith vanished. Then Aime. Then Kent.
After Kent disappeared, Bundy moved on to Colorado, where five more women were abducted between March and June 1975.
In June he returned to Utah. Soon after, 15-year-old Susan Curtis was kidnapped from a youth gathering at Brigham Young University.
For two months there had been no other victims. Then, on Aug. 16, dressed in his dark clothes and carrying two sets of handcuffs, Bundy parked his Volkswagen in Hayward’s neighborhood, outside the home where two girls, 17 and 19, had been left alone.
On Oct. 2, DaRonch and two other women picked the shaggy-haired suspect out of a lineup. Bundy was arrested and charged with attempted kidnapping.
He said he was innocent, and defense attorney Bruce Lubeck was convinced.
“I certainly thought it was a case of mistaken identity, but I think it’s fair to say . . . that my perceptions have changed over time,” said Lubeck.
*
Bundy was never tried for the murders in Utah. As was the case in the other states, detectives only had circumstantial evidence. Investigators from Utah, Washington and Colorado all agreed their best shot at stopping Bundy was by charging him with trying to kidnap DaRonch.
“This was a real challenge, knowing the consequence if Bundy had been let loose,” said David Yocom, who prosecuted the case and is now the Salt Lake district attorney.
Each day, 200 people, most of them reporters, lined up for 50 seats in the courtroom--which became Bundy’s stage.
“He was obviously a very bright, articulate person who had developed quite a following of people who believed that he was not guilty,” said Judge Stewart Hanson, who didn’t know at the time that Bundy was also suspected of a string of murders. Bundy had waived a jury trial.
The showboating grated on Yocom, who demanded Bundy stop calling him “Dave.”
“What still sticks out in my mind is Bundy’s almost arrogant attitude,” Yocom said. “You always sensed he thought he was smarter than anybody in the courtroom.”
Lubeck, who now heads the U.S. attorney’s office narcotics task force and is a judicial nominee, said Bundy’s act backfired.
“He testified he didn’t do it, but his attitude, as I recall . . . was kind of cocky.”
On March 1, 1976, Hanson convicted Bundy and sentenced him to up to 15 years in prison. That gave Colorado investigators time to nail down a murder case, and Bundy was extradited for trial there. But Bundy escaped in December 1977 and hopped a train. He was gone.
He resurfaced two weeks later in Tallahassee, Fla., where he crept into a sorority house and bludgeoned four women, killing two. He attacked another woman that same night, and weeks later he kidnapped and killed 12-year-old Kimberly Leach.
Police arrested him a week later in a stolen car.
After a trial that became a media spectacle, Bundy was sentenced to death for all three killings. He appealed for 11 years, but began confessing just before his execution.
“I felt wholeheartedly that he was trying to clear the air before he met his maker,” said Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Detective Dennis Couch.
Bundy admitted 30 murders, including five in Utah. Keppel believes there may be as many as 40 more scattered across the country.
Hayward, who retired in 1986 after 33 years on the highway patrol, looks back on his biggest arrest and wonders why he took that wrong turn out of his subdivision on Aug. 16--a wrong turn that landed Bundy in jail.
“I often wonder if the Lord sent me in that direction,” he says. “If I didn’t get him that night and stop him, I don’t know how many more he would have got.”
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b15bda09777f1f80e980c19533120554 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-04-ca-15135-story.html | Kids’ Series Give Gentle Life Lessons Television Review | Kids’ Series Give Gentle Life Lessons Television Review
“Caillou” and “Clifford: The Big Red Dog,” two new weekday PBS children’s series, have a get-acquainted marathon kickoff today on KCET-TV with four episodes each airing back-to-back. The two also join KVCR-TV’s schedule on Thursday.
“Caillou” (pronounced “Kye-you”) is a 4-year-old boy who lives with his mom, dad, baby sister, Rosie, and pet cat, Gilbert. Each animated episode is an unusually realistic reflection of a preschooler’s daily fun, family interaction, challenges, disappointments and misunderstandings as Caillou grows and learns to make sense of his world.
The show consists of three separate components: a gentle reality--Caillou’s family life--expressed in animation with bright, eye-filling watercolor artwork; live-action “fantasy” segments featuring puppet versions of Caillou’s toys and his cat that reflect the show’s messages for the day; and short video moments for further reinforcement, featuring actual kids dancing, singing and playing.
The result is entertainment that respects children, and something more: With its scrupulously scripted child developmental realism, “Caillou” is a virtual guidebook for parents and caregivers.
In the first episodes, Dad’s well-meaning explanation for a dead bird in the yard confuses and scares Caillou about getting older, requiring parental reassurances.
Trying to be a good helper, Caillou makes messes; going to the doctor for an earache, or a first visit to the dentist, are scary propositions. He learns why parents can’t stay home and about different jobs grown-ups have, goes to a theme park for the first time, and has an unforgettable summer vacation with his family, camping out, swimming, playing in his own backyard.
Central to Caillou’s world are his loving parents, the antithesis of absentee or ineffectual moms and dads so common to TV. “Clifford: The Big Red Dog” focuses on positive messages with a fantasy approach. Based on the classic children’s books by Norman Birdwell, this animated series is about a red dog who is the size of a jumbo jet to match the outsized love that his owner, a little girl named Emily, has for him.
There are live-action segments in this show, too, of kids and their dogs, but most of the show is about Clifford and Emily, living in a peaceful island community with friendly pets and people--except for a snooty schoolmate and the occasional mildly cranky neighbor.
Each episode revolves around a learning experience for Clifford (voiced by John Ritter) and Emily that’s reinforced in a secondary plot involving Clifford’s doggy pals Cleo, T-Bone and Mac.
While the books’ simple illustrations don’t translate into particularly interesting animation, the idea of a gigantic canine playmate is bound to have as much appeal for viewers as it has for its many years of readers.
* “Caillou,” KCET-TV previews today at 7, 7:30, 8 and 8:30 a.m. Regular schedule, beginning Tuesday: Mondays-Fridays at noon. Also airs on KVCR-TV Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2:30 p.m.
* “Clifford: The Big Red Dog,” KCET-TV previews today at 9, 9:30, 10 and 10:30 a.m. Regular schedule beginning next Monday: Mondays-Fridays at 7:30 a.m. Also premieres on KVCR-TV Thursday at 4 p.m.
The network has rated both series TV-Y (suitable for young children).
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9056e4cb5b2c7c5923a991ad808db416 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-04-cl-15141-story.html | Birds Do It, Bees Do It, but Why’d We Say That? | Birds Do It, Bees Do It, but Why’d We Say That?
When parents engage in the big sex talk with their children, it’s likely that more than a few still call it the story of “the birds and the bees.” It’s a safe, comfortable way to get into a potentially embarrassing discussion, safe enough even for the name of a column in a family newspaper.
But where did the phrase come from, and when did it crystallize among the masses into a euphemism for sex?
“The coupling of the birds and the bees in a phrase has been around for a while,” said Ed Finegan, a USC professor of linguistics and law. It appears likely that the phrase as a euphemism for sex was inspired by at least two writers. One being Samuel Coleridge Taylor, whose verses in “Work Without Hope” (composed in 1825) refer to birds and bees separately, according to “The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins,” (HarperCollins, 1988).
All nature seems at work . . . The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing . . . and I the while, the sole unbusy thing, not honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.
Poor Sam is feeling left out of the love connection. The verses, said Finegan, are an unmistakable reference to sex. “In the past, when schools touched on such matters at all--sex was usually handled in classes with titles such as ‘Hygiene and Health.’ ” The facts of reproduction were “presented by analogy--telling how birds do it and trusting that youngsters would get the message by indirection,” write the Morrises.
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Finegan found “birds and bees” used together in a 1644 entry in the “Evelyn Diary.” The diary, considered one of the principal literary sources for life and manners in 17th century England, was published about 100 years after the death of its author, John Evelyn. The entry, said Finegan, is a reference to the elaborately decorated interior of St. Peter’s in Rome:
That stupendous canopy of Corinthian brasse; it consists of 4 wreath’d columns--incircl’d with vines, on which hang little putti [cherubs], birds and bees.
Interestingly, Finegan speculated, human sexuality is represented by the innocent cherubs coupled with images of birds and bees. The diary was published when romantic poets began writing, and “it might be that that was when ‘birds and bees’ was picked up by other poets,” said Finegan, and crystallized as a euphemism.
*
At some point, “the birds and the bees” made their way into songs (62 of them to be exact), ushering the phrase securely into popular culture. That’s OK by Tamara Kreinin, president of the Sexuality Information and Education Counsel of the United States based in New York, if it gives people who would otherwise go apoplectic on matters of human sexuality a way to talk about it. “There still is a general level of discomfort among parents when talking about sex with their children,” she points out.
The birds-and-bees euphemism appears to have made it easier for one person to query Cecil Adams, who writes “The Straight Dope,” question-and-answer column, published online and in the Chicago Reader.
“I recently celebrated my 30th birthday, and am in the initial stages of what I hope will be a serious and long-lasting relationship,” the questioner explains. “My dilemma is this: I’ve never been told the story of ‘the birds and the bees.’ Please give me the straight dope on the origin of the phrase and the details of the act(s) as it (or they) relate to man.”
Adams responds: “Don’t feel bad. Nobody explained it to me either, and I must say I made quite an impression the first night with the honey and the feathers. The significance of the birds and bees isn’t what they do, it’s simply that they do it, ‘it,’ naturally, being a tussle in the tumbleweeds, or wherever it is that the lower orders engage in sex. . . .
“Luckily for the perpetuation of species, there’s always been Louie in the schoolyard to explain how things really worked.”
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Birds & Bees is a weekly column on relationships and sexuality.
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9608e461015fdc4512bd30eeaae2cfe3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-09-ca-18339-story.html | ** 1/2 Joan Osborne, “Righteous Love,” Interscope. | ** 1/2 Joan Osborne, “Righteous Love,” Interscope.
Five years after her debut, Osborne finally returns with an album (in stores Tuesday) focused less on the proven pop formula of her hit “One of Us” and more on quirky, multi-layered rock. Producer Mitchell Froom adds offbeat texture to the singer’s rich vocals. And Osborne makes some interesting song choices, from Gary Wright’s now-obscure ‘70s hit “Love Is Alive” to Bob Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love.” The result leaves this bluesy shouter (who plays Monday at the Sun Theatre and Tuesday at the House of Blues) far less strident than Melissa Etheridge, but still short of Bonnie Raitt at her best.
*
Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent). The albums are already released unless otherwise noted.
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83549470fb74b7a91efa66c46951c2f1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-10-tm-18408-story.html | The Go-Go’s Ain’t Gone | The Go-Go’s Ain’t Gone
Monday, 7:15 p.m.
It’s raining in New York. Kathy Valentine is contemplating a suntan from a bottle and Belinda Carlisle is naked, save for a lace thong under an NYPD-issued blue-plastic rain poncho. Days before their concert tour is to begin in Detroit, the Go-Go’s have agreed to play a handful of songs on an outdoor stage in Times Square as part of the city’s Fleet Week festivities. From their dressing room, they peek at the crowd, mainly uniformed sailors on shore leave getting drenched. Lead singer Carlisle, who ditched her planned ensemble because of the downpour, calls for their tour manager, Paul Spriggs. Though he has lived much of the last two decades in buses with such bands as Run-DMC and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Spriggs has never toured with five women in their 40s. He seems newly on alert, trying to anticipate their demands.
“Paul, I need a stapler,” says Carlisle, smiling sweetly. In minutes, he produces one. She fastens the sides of the poncho and slides into black heels. While they admire her daring, Carlisle’s bandmates declare the poncho unflatteringly long. Valentine comes to the rescue with nail scissors. Voila! “Fashion regression,” says Carlisle, 42, referring to the garbage bags she sported onstage at L.A. punk clubs more than 20 years ago.
In the earliest days of the Go-Go’s, the band’s five members, each barely beyond her teens, believed two things: First, that they would never break up. Second, that they couldn’t imagine doing this job past age 39. But after just five years, before ever running up against the paradox inherent in those beliefs, the band imploded. “It never occurred to me that it would end,” says Valentine, the bassist, now 41. “I was devastated. I floundered. It took me years to find my own musical identity.”
To the public, the Go-Go’s were a clique of spirited, guitar-wielding California girls who had more in common musically with the Beach Boys and Shangri-Las than with the synth-pop acts that dominated ‘80s New Wave. Moreover, they were forever linked to one another as pop pioneers: Not only were they the first all-female band with an album to hit Billboard’s No. 1 spot, but they were the first to crack even the top 100. For Angeleno girls of a certain age, the Go-Go’s were a point of civic pride: They proved you could grow up right here and become a rock star. Carlisle’s voice, with its crisp, West Valley enunciation and range that rarely dipped below that of a school-choir alto, only encouraged these fantasies. Since the band dissolved, each member has enjoyed playing either solo or starting lesser-known bands. But none has achieved the commercial success they had together and, it seems, took for granted. “My biggest regret in life,” says guitarist Jane Wiedlin, 41, with a hint of bitterness in her Judy Holliday voice, “is how little I enjoyed the Go-Go’s experience.”
The experience was marred by the collision of five strong, if not fully mature, personalities. There remains the specter of what might have been. What if they hadn’t allowed egos and money to come between them? What if they had spent more time in the studio and less time partying? Today, 15 years after their split, the bandmates are writing new material and spending their summer on tour. But, save for some highly esoteric in-jokes, the Go-Go’s have left their old baggage behind. This time drugs, booze and on-the-road dalliances have been replaced by acupuncture, Pilates and calls home to the kids. (Two are married and moms.) “If you’re not going to spend money on drugs,” says Wiedlin, “you might as well spend it on a massage.” On a ticket with another ‘80s favorite, the B-52’s, they are selling out mid-size venues and proving that there is still a market for the Go-Go’s--at least as an evening of nostalgia.
The challenge will be getting their core fans--those who were teenagers in the ‘80s--to view them as a viable band this decade. “In high school, you wanted to be them: be with your best friends, share clothes, travel all over the world,” says music-industry executive Michelle Hinz, who was 14 in 1981 when the Go-Go’s’ first album, “Beauty and the Beat,” came out. “I think people still have positive feelings about the Go-Go’s because they were never a guilty pleasure,” she says. (Being a devout fan of, say, Wham! in your 30s might be harder to own up to.) Still, fond memories will only take a comeback act so far, she says. “You gotta have a hit. It’s harsh that way. You can put on the best show, be the coolest people, but it’s not a hit if the music isn’t there.”
Remarkably, considering the time that has passed, the Go-Go’s are still one of the few all-female bands out there. Alternative favorite Luscious Jackson broke up recently; the punk-pop group Sleater-Kinney has yet to crack the mainstream. “It’s great that we’re still unique,” says Wiedlin. “But it’s not a great comment on society.” Of course, there are other female rock stars (Courtney Love, Shirley Manson and Gwen Stefani), and many of them front bands. But the dearth of all-girl bands is easy to overlook in an age of the Lilith Fair, when female singers are backed by male musicians, and the pre-fab Spice Girls serve up “Girl Power.” As the Go-Go’s step back into the niche they vacated, guitarist Charlotte Caffey, 43, assesses their situation this way: “It’s like, ‘Guys, if we don’t figure it out this time, we’re idiots.’ ”
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MONDAY, 7:23 P.M.
Standing in the stage wings, Miss America, 25-year-old Heather French, is singing along to “We Got the Beat.” At her side, the young man whose job is to tote around Miss America’s tiara in a wooden box is bobbing his head. As cameras project the crowd onto the Times Square Jumbotron, it becomes evident that nearly everyone--including all those servicemen who were toddlers when the band broke up--knows the words to “Vacation” and “Our Lips are Sealed.” The Go-Go’s may not have a huge catalog, but it does include some hook-filled classics. In the dressing room after the show, Valentine watches the Navy men through the window. “We should have played another song. Those guys are serving the country--we need to entertain them.” “So go invite two up to your room,” suggests drummer Gina Schock, 42.
Before Valentine can respond, a representative from their management company comes in. “Do you want to do ABC-TV?” “We want to do whatever will help our career,” says Valentine.
What might have helped their career 15 years ago was intensive group therapy. Having forged a fast alliance during the late 1970s L.A. punk scene, it was as if each of the Go-Go’s, in a fit of youthful exuberance, had entered into a marriage to four other people picked up in a bar. When fame and its attendant ills pummeled them, that untested relationship cracked under the stress of egos that demanded equal time on albums and in the press, varying degrees of drug and alcohol addiction, and fights over the disparity in earnings because Caffey and Wiedlin (the primary composers) were receiving lucrative songwriting royalties.
“We may have broken up at the height of our fame, but it was not,” Schock says pointedly, “the height of our success.” While they could take satisfaction in their popularity, they were less proud of how they comported themselves privately. “It’s like the first time you fall in love; your eyes are just glazed over, you’re just so swept up by the whole thing,” says Schock. “The second or third time around, if you’re lucky enough for that to happen, you should have your [act] together, know what’s important and what makes you happy.”
In fact, there were second and third chances. Though effectively divorced in 1985, the band reunited twice--in 1990 and 1995--at the urging of their former record label to tour in support of albums recycling their hits: “Go-Go’s Greatest” and “Return to the Valley of the Go-Go’s.” “The first time,” says Valentine, “it felt good to be friends again.” The second reunion, for which they grudgingly put on smiles and seemed little more than a five-headed oldies jukebox, was miserable. (Caffey, then pregnant, didn’t attend; guitarist Vicki Peterson, late of the Bangles, replaced her.) After that, remembers Valentine, “I said I would never do it again.”
When the tour ended, so did any forced familiarity. Caffey spoke to Wiedlin, but not to Valentine or Schock, who didn’t learn about the birth of Caffey’s daughter until later. Valentine sometimes heard from Schock, but never from Wiedlin. Carlisle kept in casual contact with everyone, but lived halfway around the world in Provence, France, with her husband and son.
The band has e-mail to thank for its current state of togetherness. About 18 months ago, when a director approached Caffey and Wiedlin about turning the Go-Go’s story into a feature film, they sent news of the offer to the others via e-mail. The dialogue that ensued raised the question of yet another reunion. Could they bear to do it again? Soon accusations and apologies zoomed across town and across the ocean. The nonconfrontational medium allowed them to express things they never had said face-to-face. (Schock, who did not own a computer, was included by phone.) Each one easily recalled incidents or offhanded remarks, nearly two decades old, that still stung. In turn, each apologized for bad behavior.
The result is that the Go-Go’s are by contract a band again. Immediately, they agreed on one thing: “We can’t keep playing these songs over and over,” moans Schock. So they have committed to record a new album for release next year. The contentious issue of songwriting royalties was settled with the help of lawyers. Now they all share writing credit. One of their first new compositions, “Apology,” can be read as a characteristically Go-Go’s boyfriend tune or as a musical telling of how they repaired relationships within the band.
TUESDAY, 3:54 A.M.
Jane Wiedlin can’t sleep. She, too, can’t quite believe that she’s doing this again, and has worked herself into a fit of anxiety over the tour schedule, which includes several nights on which the band plays a show, gets on the bus and arrives in the next city early the following morning. What if she can’t do it anymore? What if this was just a bad idea?
TUESDAY, 12:30 P.M.
Caffey goes shopping at Sam Ash Music for a practice guitar amp and at Bloomingdale’s for a Wonderbra (“good onstage support”). She browses the shoe department but feels she can’t drop $200 on a pair. “In the old days I never thought about money--but then, of course, the clothes were so ugly in the ‘80s there was nothing I wanted,” she says. “Now I’d rather buy something for my daughter.” While on the road, Caffey logs onto her e-mail to download digital home movies of her 5-year-old. With two musician parents (Caffey’s husband is Redd Kross singer and guitarist Jeff McDonald), daughter Astrid is already plotting her ascent. She has made up a band, called Sno-Cone, and occasionally picks out clothes and announces, “This is what I’m going to wear when we play Japan.” The band schedules a break midway through the tour. When Caffey flies home, Astrid asks her, “Mom? Can we go up and cuddle, like in the old days?” “The old days?” laughs Caffey, a bit horrified. “It was just three weeks ago!”
WEDNESDAY, 5:24 P.M.
As the limousine pulls away from the hotel, one band member, whose identity will remain undefined, announces she has forgotten something in her room. The car stops and she runs off. The others are getting antsy as rush-hour traffic clogs the streets. Finally, the Go-Go in question returns, having sprinted conspicuously through the hotel lobby with a personal massager. The other four collapse in laughter. “That,” says one, catching her breath, “was totally worth the wait.”
WEDNESDAY, 9:30 P.M.
MTV News reporter Kurt Loder is on their plane from New York to Detroit. He greets them: “Uh, welcome back.” Pause. “What are you doing here?”
“We’re playing,” says Valentine. “Friday. You should come.” Though Loder is the senior man at the cable channel’s news division, this is the first he has heard of a Go-Go’s summer tour. He is en route to Detroit to cover an Eminem concert. Back when the Go-Go’s sold as many records as Eminem does, the L.A. folk singer Phranc used to perform a song called “Everywhere I Go I Hear the Go-Go’s.” (". . . through the sound of dropping bombs / they’re dancing to them in Lebanon . . . .”)
To approach that popularity today will require proscribed comeback rites codified by MTV’s grown-up sister network, VH1. Recognizing this, the Go-Go’s cooperated with a “Behind the Music” documentary in what proved a genre-defining episode: Fast fame. Drugs. Drunken sex antics caught on tape (and recently available on EBay). Lawsuits. Dissolution. Sobriety. Redemption.
Caffey’s revelations were particularly affecting. Although all of the women recounted nights lost to alcohol and cocaine, the quiet, pridefully punctual guitarist admitted to a consuming heroin addiction. So carefully had she hidden her past that after watching “Behind the Music,” one of Caffey’s sisters called to say that the show must have gotten it wrong, that Caffey had had, at worst, a drinking problem. And some of the mothers at Astrid’s preschool questioned why she would discuss a problem she had put behind her long ago. “I decided to talk about it because I take my sobriety very seriously,” Caffey says. Neither she nor Valentine ever touch alcohol now, though the others drink socially. Surprisingly, she doesn’t associate life on the road with her addiction. “The year after I got sober I went on tour with Belinda,” says Caffey. “I thought I’d try it out and see what happens. And [taking drugs] didn’t appeal to me. I’d rather have a piece of chocolate cake.”
Listening to Caffey recount her story, Wiedlin is nodding. “I don’t think the worry is, ‘Are the Go-Go’s going to get me back on drugs?’ Instead it’s been, ‘Are we going to be able to get along and not lose our minds?’ ”
WEDNESDAY, 10:55 P.M.
Arriving at the hotel, each checks in under her tour pseudonym (Babe Lincoln, Iona Trailer, Sharon Needles, etc.) Then they escape to the privacy of their own rooms. Not hanging out together every minute is one of the new rules for sanity while touring. “It used to be that everybody was up everybody else’s ass,” is how Schock puts it. “Years ago, if Belinda and Kathy decided they wanted to go into Detroit for dinner and hadn’t asked me immediately, I would have felt like I was missing out on something. Now I’m happy to stay in my room and read. Back then, we were partying every night. I might have brought books with me, but I probably never read them.”
THURSDAY, 12:05 P.M.
The Go-Go’s board the bus that will be home for five weeks (the tour ended in early August) and pick bunks, as if it were the first day of camp. The beds are stacked three high, and the middle row is coveted. (The top sways; the bottom is noisy.) It is agreed they will rotate so everyone gets a chance to sleep in the middle. Schock puts James Brown on the tape deck and Carlisle settles into a seat with a book about UFO sightings.
THURSDAY, 2:40 P.M.
In a men’s locker room at the small sports arena they’ve rented for rehearsal, Carlisle is calling home to France on her cell phone. She misses her son. When she finally gets through, she learns that Duke is taking a nap; she’ll have to try again later. “I could call 12 times a day, but I don’t,” she says. “It’s torturous.” At 8 years old, Duke has no aspirations of following his mom into music. Instead, she says, he takes after his grandfather, the actor James Mason. (Carlisle’s husband is Morgan Mason, a former Reagan administration aide, who now runs a cable station in Europe.) “My son has a concept [of the Go-Go’s], but he’s not interested,” says Carlisle. “Before I left he asked me why I couldn’t just do this all over the phone.”
THURSDAY, 3:50 P.M.
The ploddingly slow tech rehearsal in this empty arena in Saginaw, Mich., grinds to a standstill as Schock, behind the drum kit, takes a last drag on a cigarette. A couple of the others, some reformed smokers, bark at her to hurry up. “Are we playing or smoking?” At an earlier rehearsal they had equipment problems, causing similar tension. “We used to be such prima donnas,” says Schock. “We would have walked out.” But this time no one storms off. The sulkiness quickly passes. “I’m on constant monitor now,” admits Valentine, “checking if I snapped at anyone.”
Over the last 15 years, each woman essentially has been the boss of her own career or band. But while they enjoyed the freedom of self-determination, those leaner years gave them an appreciation for what they gave up. The other projects, says Schock, “helped us grow as musicians and writers. But ultimately, despite what you’ve learned in that time, how are you going to get it to the public unless you’re in a band that can make that happen? The Go-Go’s is the forum to get what we do out there.”
FRIDAY, 3:45 P.M.
A fan from Chicago is waiting to see his idols before they board their bus. He quit his waiter job to follow the band’s tour, beginning in Detroit. Equally flattered and appalled, they sign a stack of his pictures dating back to the early ‘80s. “I don’t even have some of these,” says Wiedlin. The fan offers her a few duplicates. Inside the bus, they pore over them, jaws dropping over ill-advised perms, pumps worn with Day-Glo sweat socks and a decade’s worth of bad belts. “We were babies!” “Look how thin I was. And I always felt fat!” “It’s all so embarrassing. I can’t look. Wait, lemme see that.”
FRIDAY, 8:17 P.M.
The sun has not quite set over the outdoor arena in suburban Detroit. Beach balls are volleyed across a crowd that is happy to welcome the Go-Go’s back; the last time they played here was 1984. Schock, who began the evening with one leg shaking from nerves, is comfortably smashing away behind the drum kit. Valentine and Caffey amuse themselves with bits of guitar stage business, as Wiedlin twirls and Carlisle improvises a dance of Emma Peel poses. If, as teenagers, they believed that doing this job would look ridiculous after a certain age, they are no longer surprised that it doesn’t.
As in New York, the audience sings with the hits. Then it’s time to debut a new song. “Pretend you like this just as much,” jokes Wiedlin. Whether these people will go out and buy the new album remains to be seen.
FRIDAY, 9:40 P.M.
At a small reception after the show, Caffey is beaming. There are aspects of the performance that could have gone more smoothly. Who cares? “The whole time I was thinking, ‘I get to do this still.’ ” Regardless of the band’s future prospects, they are ensured a place in the pop record books. More significantly, they share a place in each other’s histories. Schock, for one, can’t talk about the vine inked around her wrist without telling the story of the long-ago day when she and Wiedlin wandered into a Sunset Boulevard tattoo parlor and made some chemically clouded, yet permanent, cosmetic decisions.
In the post-Go-Go’s years, says Valentine, “I put band after band together and learned that you can have great musicians, but if you don’t have that chemistry, it doesn’t work. You put us five in a room together, and something happens. It’s never been a question of ‘Do we still have it?’ But rather, ‘Do we want it?’ ” Without irony, she echoes a sentiment from the band’s beginnings: “We might not want to be doing this in 20 years, but right now there’s no reason we can’t have a really good run.”
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Styled by Anita Morand; hair and makeup: Danielle Russell; on Jane Wiedlin: Heike Jarick sweater and Piane Gonda choker; on Kathy Valentine: Christina Perrin tank top, Xin on Melrose necklace and Slane & Slane choker; on Belinda Carlisle: Prada sweater, Vivienne Tam at Bloomingdale’s skirt, Jimmy Choo shoes, Slane & Slane ring; on Gina Schock: Christina Perrin jacket, William Reed tee and Tommy Hilfiger pants; on Charlotte Caffey: PureJoy shirt, skirt and tie.
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7796d37dc3312d5307f5daf36c641cc7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-11-ca-19025-story.html | ‘Big Brother’ Guests Threaten Walkout | ‘Big Brother’ Guests Threaten Walkout
The escalating tension between the contestants of the CBS “reality” series “Big Brother” and its producers took a surreal turn over the weekend, as the six remaining “house guests” vowed to leave en masse during this Wednesday’s live broadcast--more than two weeks before the program’s scheduled finale.
The revolt is being spearheaded by George, the oldest contestant, who is upset about producers manipulating the contest rules in addition to a campaign by his wife that may have contributed to the ouster of another contestant from the temporary quarters in Studio City where the group is sequestered.
Encouraging the mutiny, George said during a group powwow on Saturday, “Don’t you know what kind of point we could all make? We could all go out winners.”
The debate played out on the show’s official Internet site as the other members of the house eventually agreed, saying they would all walk out during Wednesday’s telecast. Under the rules of the contest, anyone can leave the house voluntarily but cannot return and will be immediately disqualified.
CBS had little response to the threat Sunday, with a spokesman saying, “This is unscripted television. We will just have to wait and see what unfolds.” However, one source said the network already had contingency plans in case the participants exit. The show airs six times a week and is scheduled to continue through Sept. 30. Last week, CBS announced plans to expand the finale--scheduled opposite NBC’s coverage of the Olympics--to two hours.
Still, the “Big Brother” experiment increasingly appears to be spiraling out of control, engendering hostility toward the network and producers among the show’s die-hard viewers. There have been several security breaches, including a woman dubbed “The Megaphone Lady” who has sought to yell warnings to the house guests. Unconfirmed reports, posted on the Internet, say CBS security officers chased the woman through a residential neighborhood in the last few days after her latest effort to contact the occupants over the complex wall.
Hostilities Brewing for Weeks
Ten contestants entered the “Big Brother” house July 4 and have had their every move recorded while mostly being denied access to family or the outside world. Every two weeks, the participants vote two of their own to be banished from the house, with viewers making the final decision on who leaves in a call-in poll. The winner of the game will receive $500,000.
Three of the six remaining contestants--Cassandra, a United Nations official; Eddie, a one-legged college student and basketball player; and Curtis, an attorney--are the latest marked for banishment, with the viewers’ decision to come on Wednesday.
Hostilities between the contestants and the network have been brewing for several weeks and reached a crescendo last Wednesday when they all rejected an offer on live TV that would have paid one of them $50,000 to leave the “Big Brother” house. The producers had hoped to introduce a young woman in the house in an attempt to heighten tension in the mostly harmonious environment.
Chat rooms on the Internet have featured angry correspondence about CBS and the production company, Endemol Entertainment, with many postings calling the show a “train wreck” and accusing the producers of unfairly manipulating the process.
The “no outside contact” provision of the show has been violated several times, with contestants being allowed to talk to family and former occupants. One contestant, Curtis, was allowed to attend Sunday’s Emmy ceremony as a reward for winning an in-house contest.
Discomfort among the contestants has grown since last week, when Brittany, the most recently banished from the house and one of the most popular contestants, told Josh, a civil engineering student, in a brief talk sponsored by “Big Brother” that George’s wife had staged a call-in campaign to have her banished, since she was probably his greatest competition.
After a few days, Josh told George about his wife’s strategy. Upset by the news, and feeling that his colleagues felt he was the front-runner, George said he would walk out Wednesday. Then he encouraged the others to join him.
“This show is trying to prove a point to the world,” he told the group. “This show isn’t about who is the most popular guy or the most popular woman. . . . If people move together as one, they’ll win. If they’ve got one stray, they’ll lose.”
He added, “Look at it! We’ve got a black woman, an Asian, an old-timer, a playboy, a basketball star and a beauty queen. Look at what we’ve covered.”
Although there was some dissent--particularly Eddie--they eventually came to agreement.
Said Josh, “It would be the greatest statement a group of people could make.”
*
Times staff writer Brian Lowry contributed to this report.
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7b1e2e1735dca9f9639822d0371a124a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-14-mn-20908-story.html | Wen Ho Lee Freed; Judge Scolds U.S. Over Case Tactics | Wen Ho Lee Freed; Judge Scolds U.S. Over Case Tactics
Wen Ho Lee walked out of court a free man Wednesday after a federal judge repeatedly apologized for incarcerating him for nine months without trial and angrily rebuked the Clinton administration for its handling of a case that “embarrassed this entire nation.”
In a morning marked by high drama, laughter and tears of joy, the former Los Alamos nuclear weapon scientist agreed in thickly accented English to a negotiated deal that brings an abrupt end to the highly controversial case.
Lee pleaded guilty to one felony charge of illegally retaining national defense information. He was sentenced to the 278 days he has served since his arrest. The government dismissed all 58 other counts, many of which carried life sentences.
“Next few days, I’m going fishing,” Lee declared with a broad grin on the mobbed courthouse steps after his release. His lawyer Mark Holscher called it “a sweet day indeed.”
In a sworn statement provided as part of the deal, Lee said for the first time that he did not intend to harm the United States when he downloaded classified nuclear weapon data onto an unsecured computer and portable tapes at Los Alamos and that he had not passed the tapes or their contents to anyone.
Lee, 60, also agreed to submit to intense debriefings by government investigators for 10 days over the next three weeks and further questioning if necessary over the next year to satisfy government concerns about why Lee created the tapes and what he did with them. Lee could face further prosecution if he fails to comply.
Norman Bay, U.S. attorney for New Mexico, called the resolution of the high-profile and highly controversial national security case “a favorable disposition for the government and a fair disposition for the defendant.”
But the court hearing was dominated by U.S. District Judge James A. Parker’s stunning summation, an emotion-charged monologue in which he repeatedly apologized to Lee and bitterly condemned government prosecutorial tactics.
Speaking in somber tones to a packed and hushed courtroom, Parker excoriated what he called the “top decision-makers in the executive branch.” He particularly criticized the White House, U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and the FBI for their roles in bringing the case.
“They have embarrassed this entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it,” Parker said.
The decision to prosecute Lee, he said, “was made at the highest levels of the executive branch in Washington, D.C.” He cited a meeting of senior Justice and Energy Department officials at the White House on Dec. 4, six days before Lee was indicted.
The executive branch, Parker warned, “has enormous power, the abuse of which can be devastating to our citizens.”
In contrast, Parker effusively praised Lee’s lawyers as “outstanding” and said that they would have provided a “formidable” defense had the case gone to trial.
“You turned a battleship in this case,” the judge told Lee’s lawyers from the bench.
Prosecutors sat stone-faced through much of Parker’s harsh scolding. The FBI’s chief investigator, Robert Messemer, whose recantation last month of his own testimony sharply undermined the prosecution’s case, scowled. Messemer, a beefy man with slicked-back hair, avoided reporters after the hearing.
An FBI source in Washington said that, while Messemer’s conduct in the case will be routinely reviewed, the agency seems to believe that his testimony “wasn’t that inaccurate” and it is doubtful he will be disciplined.
But Parker, who took over as chief federal judge in New Mexico this month, repeatedly said that the government “misled” him by exaggerating evidence against Lee in December when prosecutors insisted that the Taiwan-born scientist should be denied bail and held incommunicado in jail until his trial.
“Dr. Lee, I feel great sadness that I was led astray” during the December bail hearing, Parker said.
Parker, 63, also criticized John J. Kelly, the former U.S. attorney here, who quit in January to run for Congress. Before leaving, Kelly “personally argued vehemently against your release and persuaded me not to release you,” the judge told Lee.
“In hindsight, you should not have been held in custody,” he added.
Until recently, Lee spent his time in virtual solitary confinement in a Santa Fe jail. He was allowed to see his family one hour a week and to exercise alone one hour a day. He was shackled hand and foot even during those periods, however, as well as during his meetings with his lawyers.
Parker complained that the government moved much too slowly, despite his urgings, to ease the conditions of Lee’s confinement.
“Dr. Lee, you were terribly wronged by being held in pretrial custody in demeaning and unnecessarily punitive conditions,” Parker said. “I am truly sorry.”
Parker also questioned why the government ignored an offer by Lee’s lawyers, shortly before his indictment Dec. 10, for Lee to take a polygraph test at Los Alamos to answer questions about the tapes. Had they responded, the judge suggested, the last nine months might have been avoided.
“Nothing came of it, and I am saddened that nothing came of it,” Parker said.
But Parker called it “most perplexing” that the government, which repeatedly fought to keep Lee in jail, “should suddenly agree to release you” without any conditions. “This makes no sense to me.”
Lee’s family and supporters burst into loud applause when Parker dismissed the court--and closed the sensational case--shortly after 1 p.m. here. Many wept, hugged and cheered as they filed out into the blinding New Mexico sunshine.
The plea arrangement was hammered out last weekend after a series of secret sessions but nearly collapsed Monday shortly before the plea was to be filed and Lee was to go home.
In a case marked by agonizing cliffhangers, prosecutors insisted on additional concessions at the last minute, including a demand that Lee submit to government questions for more time than in the original proposed agreement.
The court-appointed mediator, U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Edward Leavy, rushed to Albuquerque on Tuesday from his home in Portland, Ore., to negotiate a compromise. He met prosecutors and defense lawyers until nearly 3 a.m. Wednesday before the stalled deal was revived.
Lee will pay no fine or restitution under the agreement and is not subject to probation or supervision. He must get approval from the government if he wishes to travel abroad during the next year, but Leavy will mediate any disputes.
Lee arrived at his home in White Rock, a suburb of Los Alamos, at 5:30 p.m. local time to a tumultuous welcome from friends and supporters, as well as a crush of reporters and camera crews crowded around his simple wood-and-brick bungalow.
In a brief statement, Lee thanked his neighbors. “They made me very strong when I was in jail,” he said.
The first sign that Lee was going home came at 7:50 a.m., when defense attorney Holscher strode up the courthouse steps with a broad smile. “It’s a good morning, a very good morning,” he said.
But a 9 a.m. hearing was quickly postponed until 10, and that was pushed back another hour as lawyers drafted final wording of the deal. Lee, who wore a dark gray suit and a blue tie, appeared relaxed as he waved at friends and laughed with his lawyers. His wife, Sylvia, daughter, Alberta, and son, Chung, waited silently in the front row of the courtroom.
Finally, at 11:02, the silver-haired Parker entered the courtroom in his flowing black robes.
“I understand the parties have finally agreed,” he announced.
Lee raised his right hand, fingers splayed far apart, as he was sworn in beside his lawyers. For the next 90 minutes, the judge patiently explained the 10-page plea agreement, stopping every few minutes to ask Lee if he understood and agreed.
Although Lee has lived in the United States since the 1960s and is a naturalized U.S. citizen, he asked the judge to repeat himself several times or turned to his lawyers for a whispered explanation. “Now I understand, yes,” he then would answer.
As a convicted felon, Lee will lose the right to run for office, serve on a jury, possess a gun or vote.
“You’ll be giving up your right to cast a vote about what was done to you,” Parker told Lee. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Lee replied softly.
Finally, Lee read aloud his crime: “On a date certain in 1994, I used an unsecured computer in T-Division to download a document or writing relating to the national defense,” he began.
Lee said he knew at the time that possession of the tape outside the X-Division, the lab’s top-secret weapon design area, was unauthorized and violated lab directives. He said he kept the tape and never returned it to the lab.
“How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?” the judge finally asked at 11:58 a.m.
“Guilty,” Lee said firmly, leaning forward into the microphone. A tiny man, he stood a full head shorter than his attorneys and appeared an unlikely subject of such intense attention.
If convicted in court of the same crime, Lee could have been sentenced to 10 years in jail, a $250,000 fine and mandatory three years’ probation.
Except for an interview on CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes” in August 1999, Lee had not spoken publicly before. An anonymous scientist in the secret world of nuclear weapons, Lee exploded into the nation’s headlines in March 1999, when he was identified as the target of an FBI investigation into Chinese espionage. Photos of his arrest, when he was escorted away by burly FBI agents, were shown again and again.
The case created a political firestorm on Capitol Hill, where Republican critics accused the Clinton administration of ignoring nuclear theft to soothe relations with Beijing. In the end, the FBI admitted that it had no evidence that Lee was a spy and he was not charged with espionage.
But he was indicted Dec. 10 for allegedly downloading the files. From the start, the government said that it was most concerned about recovering seven tapes that Lee had created. Lee insisted that they were destroyed but offered no proof.
Under the agreement, Lee agreed to provide a “truthful written declaration, under penalty of perjury, stating the manner in which he disposed of the seven tapes.” The statement was turned over to the government, but was not released.
The chief prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Atty. George Stamboulidis, defended the agreement, since it prevents disclosure of national secrets in open court.
Even if Lee were convicted of all charges at trial, Stamboulidis added, he “might go to prison for a very long time, but we might never learn what happened to those tapes.”
When the judge asked why the government suddenly was willing to accept Lee’s word, after challenging his veracity for months, Stamboulidis replied that Lee would face “a whole world of horribles” through further prosecution if he failed to cooperate.
In Washington, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh defended the bureau’s actions in the Lee case and insisted that the most important result--protecting the nation’s secrets--has been realized.
In a statement, Freeh said that the plea agreement “provides the opportunity to determine what in fact happened to the nuclear design and source codes that Dr. Lee unlawfully and criminally downloaded, copied and removed from Los Alamos.”
Freeh said the data Lee took “represents the fruits of hundreds of billions of dollars of investment by the United States.”
Had they gone to trial, Freeh said, the government was prepared to prove that Lee sought to conceal what he had done, “and to destroy the electronic footprints left by the transfer and downloading process.”
He added: “The government was prepared to prove that, after the existence of the investigation became known, efforts were made by Dr. Lee to delete files that had been manipulated into unclassified systems” and “that there were many attempts--some in the middle of the night--to regain access to the classified systems even after access had been formally revoked by Los Alamos.”
“Determining what happened to the tapes has always been paramount to prosecution,” Freeh added. “The safety of the nation demands that we take this important step.”
Freeh did not mention Judge Parker’s scolding in his statement.
Reno said that she and Freeh “shoulder the awesome responsibility of protecting national security” and added that the terms of the plea will allow investigators to find out what happened to Lee’s tapes. “This is an agreement that is in the best interest of our national security in that it gives us our best chance to find out what happened to the tapes.”
*
Times staff writer Robert L. Jackson in Washington contributed to this story.
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a10b38011a8af5598cfcd5d79dbff58f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-15-ca-21320-story.html | Golden Opportunity for Olivia Newton-John in Sydney | Golden Opportunity for Olivia Newton-John in Sydney
Olivia Newton-John can’t take her eyes off the hummingbirds flitting from orchid to azalea in the backyard of her Malibu home. “Look--behind you, there,” she whispers, careful not to scare any of them away. “The green one. I don’t think I’ve seen him before.” The serenity of this moment will be replaced by a high-profile and hectic trip to Australia--the land of her childhood--where she will take part in the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney.
But today, Newton-John is in a mood that is quiet and reflective. Just back from yoga class, the youthful and pink-cheeked 51-year-old is content to follow the hummingbirds’ erratic flight patterns or running with her dogs (she has three) on the beach. It feels years beyond the 1990s, a decade that found the star of the 1978 phenomenon “Grease’ battling breast cancer, divorcing her pinup-boy husband, suffering the devastating death of a child she considered her second daughter and seeing her Koala Blue clothing empire collapse.
Now, thriving with a clean bill of health, a new film, new CDs and a new beau, this single mother has transformed her country-style home into a menagerie of dogs, cats, fish and two cockatiels.
But tonight, someone else will be watching the Malibu menagerie as she takes the stage with Australian superstar John Farnham where they will sing “Dare to Dream” to officially kick off the competition. An original song, composed especially for the Games, it will be featured on the Olympic soundtrack.
Then in 2001, to mark the 30th anniversary of Newton-John’s first hit song, her 1971 cover of Bob Dylan’s “If Not for You,” the four-time Grammy Award-winning artist will release a greatest-hits boxed set, with a few new recordings.
But within the walls of her home, less than a mile up the Pacific Coast Highway from Malibu’s Xanadu bakery, Newton-John’s songs are rarely heard. Rather, it is the voices of young pop stars such as Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Mariah Carrey that filter out from the upstairs bedroom of her 14-year-old daughter Chloe, who hopes to follow in her mother’s footsteps.
Though Newton-John is now cancer-free, the legacy of the disease remains very much a part of her life. Chloe was never aware of her mother’s battle with breast cancer until after Newton-John underwent a mastectomy, immediate reconstruction and chemotherapy. In 1991, just a year before Newton-John discovered a lump in her breast, Chloe had lost her best friend, 4-year-old Colette Chuda, to a rare form of childhood cancer.
“For Chloe, the association with cancer was death,” says Newton-John, who established the Children’s Health Environmental Coalition in Colette’s memory. “I didn’t want to freak her out by telling her that mommy had cancer too. So when I went to chemo I would figure out a way for her to go on a play date or [her] dad would take her somewhere for a couple days until I looked like I just had the flu or something.”
Chloe’s dad, former actor Matt Lattanzi, lives nearby, and although the couple became estranged in the mid-'90s and ultimately divorced, Newton-John insists their relationship remains cordial.
“We’re fine,” she says. “Chloe sees him all the time--whenever she wants.”
The current man in Newton-John’s life is 44-year-old lighting gaffer Patrick McDermott, whom she met on a commercial shoot. Though the two have been dating exclusively for the past four years, Newton-John feels it’s too soon to be discussing marriage. “Not right now,” she says. “I like married life, but I also like my freedom and independence. Marriage is frightening because it is confronting. That person is with you all the time and makes you see things about yourself that maybe you don’t want to see.”
At the end of the year, American audiences will get to see another side of Newton-John. In the film “Sordid Lives” (currently screening in film festivals and co-starring Beau Bridges and Delta Burke), Newton-John plays Bitsy Mae Harling, an ex-con “white-trash country singer with a Texas accent.” As she describes the process of getting into character, Newton-John slips into her trailer park persona, slumping back in her lawn chair, chewing a faux wad of gum and adopting a disturbingly realistic Texan twang.
“I was just playing myself,” she jokes. “I had some [temporary] tattoos put on, which I always wanted to try. I cut my hair myself, bleached it yellow and left the roots and put on really sleazy makeup and really tacky clothes. It was kind of like [my “Grease” character] Sandy gone terribly wrong.”
Then Newton-John backpedals just a bit, explaining how she admires some aspects of that life: “There’s something admirable about living life the way you want without worrying about what anyone thinks.”
Since her cancer, Newton-John doesn’t worry much about what others think. She has made attempts to simplify her existence--relocating to a smaller home and eliminating the knickknacks that she’d collected throughout the years. “I used to collect a lot of stuff,” she says. “Now I collect people.”
Ever grateful of this second chance at life, Newton-John stays in shape playing tennis three times a week, walking on the beach, running on her home treadmill and avoiding all foods that contain dairy and wheat products. Now, few things rock her serene world, though seeing her face on a recent cover of Senior Life certainly caused the singer to take pause.
“Oh my God,” she says, covering her face. “I did not do an interview for that. So many people were embarrassed to tell me. I think it was either my daughter or my ex-husband who finally told me that they had seen it. What can you do?”
Then she laughs and adds, “If this is senior life, it’s pretty darn good.”
*
The opening ceremonies of the 2000 Olympic Games can be seen tonight beginning at 7:30 on NBC.
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f8cd628c4608336e21ca8659a080d5c6 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-16-me-21916-story.html | Beah Richards; Oscar Nominee for ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’ | Beah Richards; Oscar Nominee for ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’
Beah Richards, a veteran stage performer and character actor whose best work included her Oscar-nominated portrayal of Sidney Poitier’s mother in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and who won an Emmy this week for a guest role in ABC’s “The Practice,” has died.
Richards, who lived in Los Angeles for many years and recently returned to her hometown of Vicksburg, Miss., died there Thursday of emphysema. She was 74.
For the record:
12:00 AM, Sep. 17, 2000 For the Record Los Angeles Times Sunday September 17, 2000 Home Edition Metro Part B Page 5 Metro Desk 2 inches; 43 words Type of Material: Correction Beah Richards--An obituary on actress Beah Richards that appeared in Saturday’s Times contained an incorrect address for Theatre of Hearts/Youth First, an organization designated by the family for memorial donations. The correct address is 400 S. Lafayette Park Place, Suite 307, Los Angeles, CA 90057. For the Record Los Angeles Times Saturday September 23, 2000 Home Edition Metro Part B Page 6 Metro Desk 1 inches; 23 words Type of Material: Correction Beah Richards--A Sept. 16 obituary gave an incorrect age for veteran stage and film actress Beah Richards. Richards, who died Sept. 14 in Vicksburg, Miss., was 80.
Too ill to receive her Emmy at the ceremony in Los Angeles on Sunday night, Richards was presented with the award Sept. 1 in Vicksburg by Lisa Gay Hamilton, one of the co-stars of “The Practice.”
Richards was recognized for a moving portrayal of an elderly Alzheimer’s patient whose daughter was trying to end her new marriage. She also won an Emmy in 1987 for a guest role in the CBS series “Frank’s Place.”
The daughter of a minister, Richards discovered a passion for acting while she was a student at New Orleans’ Dillard University. Her parents encouraged her by sending her to study at the Globe Theatre in San Diego, where she was an apprentice for three years in the late 1940s.
In 1951, she moved to New York to launch an acting career. By 1956, she had made her off-Broadway debut as a grandmother in a production of “Take a Giant Step,” a play by Louis S. Peterson about a black teenager’s struggles in a white world. She made her film debut three years later, when she was cast in the screen adaptation of the play.
She was often cast as a mother or grandmother because of her kindly face. She was Robert Hooks’ white-haired mother in director Otto Preminger’s “Hurry Sundown” in 1967. In 1998, she played Baby Suggs, the mother-in-law of the Oprah Winfrey character, Sethe, in “Beloved.” On television, she succeeded Lillian Randolph as Bill Cosby’s mother during the 1970-71 season of “The Bill Cosby Show.”
Other notable performances include the role of Sister Margaret in a New York production of James Baldwin’s “Amen Corner” in 1965 and the role of Viney in the Broadway production of “The Miracle Worker” in 1959. She reprised the latter role in the movie released in 1962.
Richards had guest spots on many television series, including “L.A. Law,” “Hill Street Blues,” “Highway to Heaven” and “Designing Women.” She recently held a recurring role in the acclaimed NBC series “ER.”
Poitier also worked with Richards in the 1967 film “In the Heat of the Night,” in which she played an abortionist. He called Richards a remarkable actress.
“One of the things that characterizes the standout actors among us all, " Poitier said Friday, “is [range] and her range was such that it accommodated theater, film, television, the lecture stage. She had that power to impact in all of those areas.
“I don’t think there is an actor who ever worked with her who wasn’t fed by her energy. When you work with an actor who penetrates your creative space and penetrates in a positive way, bringing new energy on which you can feed, then of course that actor has to be considered special.”
Richards was also a poet and playwright. During the 1970s she appeared in three of her own plays--"A Black Woman Speaks,” based on a book of her poetry by the same title, and “One Is a Crowd.” She wrote and starred in a one-woman show, “An Evening with Beah Richards,” in 1979.
Former Times drama critic Sylvie Drake, in a 1974 review of “A Black Woman Speaks” at the Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles, glowingly described her as “more phenomenon than actress.” Calling her a writer with an arresting voice, Drake wrote: “This black woman is still deeply angry, vaultingly proud and wears her white-inflicted wounds on her sleeve--or graceful arm, as the case may be. . . . This woman’s fury is bathed in decent venom.”
Richards is survived by two nieces, Sherry Green-Fisher and Rosemary Spears; two nephews, Harold McWarde and James L.W. Green; a stepsister; three great-nephews; and a great-niece.
Memorial donations may be made to Theater of Hearts/Youth First, 40 S. Lafayette Park Place, Suite 307, Los Angeles, CA 90057; the Museum and Marketplace, 392 Fisher Ferry Road, Vicksburg, MS 39180; or St. Marks Freewill Baptist Church, 2600 Hannah Ave., Vicksburg, MS 39180.
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Times staff writer Susan King contributed to this story.
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1abbec662546ba03077ff2df3138df7d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-17-tm-22313-story.html | NO LONGER THE UNIVERSITY OF SECOND CHOICE | NO LONGER THE UNIVERSITY OF SECOND CHOICE
THE SALES PITCH, SO ENTHUSIASTIC THAT IT SOUNDS CORNY, IS DELIVERED WITH A WRY SMILE and gleaming eye. “You have probably written your speech, but I wanted to show you this,” says USC President Steven B. Sample. He hands his guest a Time magazine article crowning USC as College of the Year.
Disney Chairman Michael D. Eisner responds with a dismissive wave. “I have it in my speech.” Sample takes a step back, recoiling for an awkward moment. Eisner’s assistants fuss with his black robe as the two men stand in the plush inner sanctum of Sample’s office in the gorgeous rosy brick Bovard Hall. Eisner is about to deliver a commencement address to a crowd of 8,000 restless students and their families waiting outside on campus grounds, and Sample is about to bestow on him an honorary doctorate. But there is more to this meeting for Sample. The speech isn’t the point.
He gathers himself, leans in close and tries again, this time in tones approaching conspiratorial: “We’ve distributed 600,000 of these Time magazine’s College of the Year. Every living Trojan has gotten two or three of them, and some of the dead ones, too.”
Eisner smiles at the joke, lets out a long breath. He pauses to take full measure of his host. Sample beams back. There it is at last. The connection. Sample chalks up another potential friend for the university, counts another victory. It’s a small one, admittedly, but if you’re president of a university long ridiculed as the “University of Second Choice” for the scions of the rich who couldn’t get into UCLA, Stanford or Berkeley, every victory counts. And in the nine years that Sample has been president, there have been many victories, so many in fact that something is dying, and fast: USC’s reputation. It’s not your father’s jock and frat-boy party school. Not anymore.
In what until recently was one of the best-kept secrets in academic circles, USC has become a hot school. No longer does it go begging for qualified students, as it did a decade ago before Sample arrived. This year, it turned away two-thirds of its freshmen applicants. The once largely white student body has evolved into one of the most racially diverse in the nation. Average SAT scores of incoming students, once so low that in 1987 that the irreverent Stanford marching band spelled them out with just three digits, soared this fall to 1,309, eclipsing those of UCLA freshmen for the first time.
There are other signs:
--USC faculty bring in nearly twice as much each year in research grants as a decade ago; they have almost doubled the number of memberships in prestigious national academies; and they landed the school’s first Nobel Prize, in 1994 for chemistry.
--The school’s financial fortunes have soared. The haul from a seven-year fund-raising campaign stands at $1.7 billion in cash and pledges, and is growing. The university’s endowment has quadrupled.
--Even the surrounding neighborhood, for years a danger zone that gave the school an abrupt and jagged edge, is on the upswing as thousands of USC staff and volunteers have reached out to help reduce crime, improve area schools or otherwise aid their poor neighbors.
But reputations die hard on college campuses, especially those with a wicked nickname like the University of Spoiled Children. If USC’s image is to catch up to the reality under Steven Browning Sample, he may have to flash that gleaming eye on every Eisner, Dick and Harry across the land. Not that he hasn’t tried.
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IT WAS A BRIGHT SPRING DAY IN MAY 1997, A DAY WHEN ANYTHING seemed possible. Alfred E. Mann, a biomedical entrepreneur, wanted to give $100 million to UCLA, his alma mater, for an institute to turn raw scientific discoveries into useful products. But Mann’s idea was bogged down in the bureaucracy of the public institution. Most people, especially fund-raisers for other universities, shook their heads, thankful they weren’t mired in a similar mess. Though they lusted after the money, they observed the prevailing etiquette: no dining on the sorrow of others.
Not Sample. He picked up the phone. “Mr. Mann, you don’t know me from Adam’s off ox,” Sample began. The conversation led to lunch at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena and, eight months later, to the $112.5-million Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering at USC. (The UCLA deal remains under negotiation.)
How did he do it? How does someone pick up the phone, ask for $100 million and get it? “He’s a very clever guy,” Mann says. Sample made a compelling case about how an entrepreneurial, private university could help Mann achieve his dream.
It wasn’t a fluke. Sample is the only college president in America to land three contributions of more than $100 million. He persuaded philanthropist Walter Annenberg, who had already donated $57 million to USC, to make one more gift. “At that time, we were talking about something at the $10-million level,” Sample recalls. “Within a few months, the idea was $120 million” for a cutting-edge communications center that integrates several disparate disciplines. A gift from the W.M. Keck Foundation started small and grew over the months to $110 million, ostensibly to turn the newly renamed Keck School of Medicine into a world-class place.
For each of them, and for countless others who’ve given less, Sample has spun a web of dreams, sketching the potential of the university or the legacy the donor can leave behind. The resulting surge of contributions is one of the secrets to Sample’s success. A building boom will add seven major projects to the campus, including a new student union, a fine arts center and a science and technology center. The money also is helping to buy respectability. The USC endowment has swelled to $2.1 billion under his watch. The campus has endowed 101 professorships, a vital tool for recruiting and retaining promising faculty. It has helped launch eight new research institutes to push the boundaries of science and intellectual thought. USC also has added 179 full-time professors and 98 part-time professors.
The infusion has also greased relations with the faculty. At most college campuses, faculty members are either unhappy or indifferent about their presidents. But at USC, professors are hungry for improvements, eager to bask in reflected glory as USC edges up in the ratings. After initial resistance, many professors “have come around to realizing he is one of the best things to happen to USC,” says Carol Muske-Dukes, a poet and English professor.
The money has also helped diversify the student body and upgrade its academic quality. Unlike Ivy League colleges and other elite schools that offer financial aid to poor students only, USC also offers it to those who have good grades and test scores--regardless of financial need. As a result, USC now draws bright students from wealthier backgrounds--including middle-class
African Americans and Latinos. It is among the top 10 destinations for National Merit scholars: 149 joined USC’s freshman class this fall, attracted, in part, by the promise of scholarships covering at least half of USC’s $23,664 annual tuition.
“Steve Sample has taken a B institution and made it an A institution,” says Barry Munitz, a former chancellor of the California State University system who’s now president of the J. Paul Getty Trust. “That doesn’t happen very often.”
Being a college president is like herding cats. Sample’s strength is his ability to sell his vision of where USC needs to go. He laid out a clear agenda soon after arriving and stuck to it, refusing to get sidetracked by day-to-day crises. He coaxed and cooed, snarled and snapped until most of the cats headed his way.
To be sure, not all of the credit belongs to Sample and his administrators. His predecessor, the late James H. Zumberge, set the school on the path toward financial stability and academic respectability during the ‘80s. Besides leading a record-busting $641-million fund-raising campaign, Zumberge engaged in the cleansing act of airing the university’s dirty secrets. Soon after arriving in 1980, he revealed that the university admitted 300 academically deficient students during the 1970s solely for their athletic prowess. Many never graduated. He began to rein in the powerful athletic department, saying upon his departure that he hoped he helped USC become “known for being more than just a place that consistently fields a strong football team.”
Sample has taken the handoff from Zumberge. If the mighty Trojan football team hasn’t lived up to its former glory, that’s OK with Steve Sample. He’ll never say that, of course. How could he? Just look at the fanatics who show up to every game bedecked head to foot in cardinal and gold. Sample will point out, however, how the public exaggerates the role of football as a Trojan money machine. The $28 million raised by the football program accounts for only 2% of USC’s $1.4- billion budget these days. But don’t think for a minute that Sample is anti-football. He’s not, even if the lapse of Pac-10 championships has given academics a chance to emerge from football’s shadow.
*
“WE ARE GOING TO HAVE A LITTLE RHYTHM BAND,” USC’S PRESIDENT ANNOUNCES to the procession of undergraduates he has led through a secret door behind wood paneling and down a spiral staircase into the basement of the presidential mansion in San Marino. He shows off his two train sets chugging along the floor and the elaborate collection of miniature John Deere tractors that cover shelves along one wall. Now, he’s handing out a tambourine, bongo drums, rattles, marimbas and other rhythm instruments. Grabbing a pair of sticks, he hops onto the stool behind his Blue Pearl Drum set. Boom. Boom. Da Boom. The students, from a leadership class Sample teaches, chime in with their instruments.
This is a side of Steven Sample that few get to see: Creative, fun, even silly. The public man is more guarded, more complex--a rather formal leader who moves with the deliberation of someone older than his 59 years. (He favors a bad back.) It’s an exacting and calculating image, projected through the rich, confident voice of a storyteller who loves to roll out allegories, G-rated jokes and “Did you know?” factoids--sometimes laid on a little too thick--that display USC in all its triumphant glory.
“It’s rare when he is not playing from his strength of charm,” says Stanley O. Ikenberry, a longtime friend and president of the American Council on Education. “You rarely see the iron fist, you usually see the velvet glove.” The public doesn’t see the other side: the complaints from his staff about his autocratic style, about his temper, about how he never seems satisfied with any gains, always pushing for more.
Sample also guards the privacy of his wife, Kathryn, his ninetysomething mother-in-law who lives with them and his two grown daughters. Yet he’s no recluse, given his duties as host of an endless parade of public functions. More than 2,000 people will attend dinners at his house this year, but few will make it past the public rooms. He jokes about this to the class he’s allowing into the basement: “You’ve seen the inner sanctum. Not many people get to. Generally, you have to give $15 or $20 million to come down here.”
Sample drums on, cocking his head and morphing into a Crazy Kat, a beatnik hipster. The image works, if you overlook the impeccable blue suit, pressed white shirt, red tie, gold Trojan stickpin and gleaming cuff links. With a little imagination, you can even see back to the precocious teenager who played timpani with the St. Louis Philharmonic and managed and played in several bands.
Aside from music, Sample’s early interests were in education and engineering, an influence of his parents. His mother was a civic activist who at one point became an acting school superintendent. His father was a sales manager for an electric motor company. In the late 1950s, Sample studied electrical engineering at the University of Illinois. His parents announced their divorce after his sophomore year. Forty years later, he recalls the breakup as “the most painful thing that ever happened to me.”
He rebounded by quickly marrying his college sweetheart, Kathryn. They moved into student housing and began a 39-year pattern of working through things together. In their cramped apartment, Steve would outline the study problems aloud from his desk; Kathryn, perched on the bed, asked questions to tease out a solution. Today she remains his confidante and most trusted advisor. “I don’t have girlfriends,” she says. “I don’t call people up on the phone and share. He’s the one I share with, and I’m the one he shares with.” He brings up her name in every speech, every lecture, every interview--attributing much of his success to a stable marriage. “It’s a tremendous competitive edge.”
Sample raced through college, earning a doctorate in engineering by age 24. He quickly landed as a professor at Purdue University. But he was restless. Never in his life had he felt committed to any one discipline or interest. He loved the arts and literature and engineering, and history, philosophy and science. People fascinated him. He simply couldn’t confine himself to being a professor of engineering.
So he tinkered with inventions. The result can be found in virtually every home in America today: the digital controls behind the touch panel now used in most microwave ovens and other home appliances. Although the patents were issued in his name, the company that sponsored his research owned the financial rights. Still, he was handsomely rewarded, making him far more flush with cash than the typical assistant professor.
But he remained restless. Then at age 29, with a faculty mentor urging him on, Sample accepted a fellowship as executive assistant to the president of Purdue. He quickly realized he’d found his calling. A university president, he saw, could dabble in many things, indulge in many interests, use many skills. So he determinedly climbed the administrative ladder at the universities of Illinois and Nebraska before becoming a college president at age 41. When he arrived at State University of New York at Buffalo in March of 1982, he found a campus as bleak and bruised as Buffalo’s notorious winter skies. He was shocked when a university trustee called “SUNY the college of last resort.” Not one student he spoke to was proud of the school.
Sample set out to strengthen both the reality and the perception of SUNY Buffalo as a major national research university. Pursuing an agenda he would later follow at USC, Sample moved to raise the caliber of students, improve education for undergraduates, increase research funding, expand the university’s service to the community and burnish the campus image. The achievements were crowned by the school’s election in the Assn. of American Universities, the prestigious clique of 61 top research institutions. Sample stayed at Buffalo for nine years, though at times he chafed under the realities of managing a public institution, with meddling by a pesky state governing board, public criticism from trustees and scrutiny by the press. When he became the 10th president of USC in 1991, Sample was delighted to be at a private school, where most university business is conducted behind closed doors.
Moving into a beautiful home 15 miles from campus was wonderful, too. There he listens to audiotapes of famous philosophers while he rides his stationary bicycle every morning. He makes a point of reading something every day that is at least 50 years old. He is fascinated with styles of leadership, of Machiavelli, Mao Tse-tung--even Adolf Hitler. Clearly his intellectual restlessness remains. He goes to poetry readings and musical concerts. He’s been known to recite favorite poems, sit in with a band. He loves language and unusual words, referring to himself as “a polymath, who is broad and catholic in his intellectual interests.” And each spring, to keep his hand in the classroom, Sample co-teaches an undergraduate course, the Art and Adventure of Leadership, with acclaimed business professor Warren Bennis.
At some universities, social liberals would criticize a college president whose San Marino residence, behind heavy iron gates in one of Southern California’s most exclusive neighborhoods, is so removed from the gritty realities of campus life. But it’s unlikely the complaint would register with Sample, for he is one of the few conservatives in a profession dominated by political liberals. He was one of only two Assn. of American Universities presidents who voted against a resolution in 1997 supporting affirmative action. He also remains critical of student protests of the ‘60s, saying they seriously harmed academic institutions. He and his wife are registered as independent voters, to prevent party politics from ever becoming an issue.
All of which is just fine with the USC Board of Trustees. They love how Sample’s magnetism attracts big donations, how he’s a tough, bottom-line administrator and a master salesman. To them, he’s worth every penny of his $391,667 yearly salary. Board Chairman John C. Argue says simply that Sample is the best college president he has ever seen. In fact, Argue would not take over as chairman until he received assurance that Sample would stay through Argue’s five-year term. “He’s born to be a college president,” he says. “Some people are better at some things than other. Whatever the mix is, he seems to have it.”
*
SOME THOUGHT THE BOSS WAS JOKING. OTHERS WERE HORRIFIED when Sample suggested: Let’s send $5 bills to alumni with self-addressed envelopes, asking them to send some money back. USC needed to increase the percentage of alumni who make annual contributions, Sample argued, for two reasons: to get alumni in the habit of making yearly donations and, perhaps more important, to help USC move up in the statistical game of university ratings.
With hundreds of thousands of college-bound students and their parents turning to published rankings to help with their decisions, USC needed the boost. It was especially important for the highly popular U.S. News & World Report rankings, which factor in the percentage of alumni who donate as “an indicator of alumni satisfaction.” Although the school was ranked 42nd on the U.S. News list of best national universities in 2000, its percentage of alumni donors stood at 60th.
So send alumni $5 each and when they send it back, count ‘em. Who cares if members of his staff took a dim view of the scheme? Sample wanted to try it.
Out went the $5 bills to a small number of alumni selected at random. “I don’t think many of the bills came back,” Sample concedes. “It was not a good idea. But a lot of other ideas have worked. And the good news is that we have doubled alumni giving since I got here.”
That’s the way Sample operates. Think of him as Mr. Fix-it, an inventor who sizes up a problem like an engineer, then brainstorms about wildly improbable solutions. Out of that creative process, usually done while lying on his back on the floor, comes novel ideas designed to take USC on its own shortcut up the rankings.
As for his practice of proposing “nominally outrageous ideas,” he views it as a way to free his staff from the constraints of traditional thinking. An idea might not work, he says, but it might unshackle another one that could be brilliant. “I’ve always prized new ideas and fresh approaches. If there are dissenters, they need to be heard. But, ultimately, I think it’s important to try new things.”
Yet when such freewheeling turns into borderline judgment calls, it confounds USC’s faculty and staff. This is the same man, they point out, who is extremely cautious as an administrator, the engineer who refuses to be pushed into a decision until he has deconstructed the problem and examined the repercussions of solutions from every angle.
He is also the guy who demands that his charges toe strict ethical and moral lines. For instance, he cracked down hard on rowdy fraternities, requiring their members’ grades be better than the USC average for men, limiting organized parties to the weekends and making bedrooms off-limits at parties featuring alcoholic drinks to cut down on sexual assaults. What’s more, every fall he lectures coaches and athletes about his priorities: One, play within all NCAA rules, no matter how stupid or irrelevant they appear; two, graduate with a bona fide degree; three, operate the team within budget; four, win conference and national championships. In that order.
How can he be such a stickler on some things, but so freewheeling on others? Those who know him best suggest that it’s two sides to the same man: a precise engineer and a creative inventor/musician. Others chalk it up to Sample’s relentless pursuit of prominence for USC. What’s the harm, he might ask, in leavening USC’s reputation with a dash of salesmanship?
It’s a question that leads directly into a subject that intrigues Sample. How to plant an idea in people’s minds. For instance, he loves to tell people how USC is the largest private employer in the city of Los Angeles. “Most people are binary in their thinking. Whenever they hear something, they think of it as good or bad, black or white, true or false,” he says. “When you make a statement that is absolutely true, but it sounds false, they cannot get it out of their minds.” After relating this fact for years, Sample now has people coming up to him with an inflated version: Did you know that USC is the largest employer in Los Angeles County? “You don’t try to exploit the misunderstanding, but sometimes you get tired of attenuating the exaggeration. You cannot fight it completely. If someone says to me, ‘It’s been nice talking to the inventor of the microwave oven,’ and walks away, do I chase that person down and correct him?”
It turns out that Sample is very good at creating a buzz about USC. He loves to write letters, regularly dispatching mass mailings to alumni, parents and other friends of the university. For five years he has corresponded with 1,600 handpicked “USC Ambassadors,” a group of opinion leaders and power brokers with some connection to the campus. Sample pores over the responses, and letters are sent out to correct any gross misunderstandings about the school. After years of correspondence, Sample laid out the second reason for these hand-picked pen pals: “As the word Ambassador suggests, you may also play a part by carrying USC’s message forward.”
Sample also knows how to make the soft sell. A few years ago, the Academic Senate passed an urgent resolution to extend health benefits to the partners of gay and lesbian employees. Worried that such domestic partner benefits might offend conservative members on the board of trustees, Sample carefully repackaged the proposal as a budgetary item, without any of the incendiary language that has made the issue a debate on other campuses. It sailed past the board.
*
SHORTLY AFTER SAMPLE arrived at USC, he was greeted by the 1992 L.A. riots. Although the campus escaped virtually unscathed, the mayhem triggered incredible pressure for USC to move to a safer neighborhood, he says. “A lot of people said, ‘Do a Pepperdine in 1999, and get the hell out of L.A.’ "--referring to Pepperdine University’s move to Malibu after the Watts riots in 1965. But Sample wanted none of it. He remembered how SUNY Buffalo had struggled for decades with the disruptions of the school’s move to the suburbs. “I wasn’t going to be the president of another university that was going to move,” Sample says. “Been there. Done that.”
If he didn’t want to move the university, he needed to get the neighborhood moving. USC hired a veteran Los Angeles police officer to work out an arrangement with his former department so that campus cops could patrol the surrounding community. Sample reviewed USC’s outreach programs scattered throughout the city and insisted that they be concentrated on the immediate community. So now, more than half of USC’s 15,000 undergraduates volunteer in the neighborhood, doing everything from painting out graffiti to tutoring in USC’s adopted family of five local schools.
It was this collection of 300 social-outreach programs--not academics--that earned USC the title of College of the Year in Time magazine and Princeton Review’s 2000 college guidebook. Perhaps more important, USC’s programs have gotten the nod from people like Juanita Judice. “I’ve lived here 49 years and most people in the neighborhood felt that USC was this uppity place that didn’t really want to be here,” she says. “That’s all changed.” As the Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray, of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, puts it: “Steve Sample is what a university president should be. He brightens the corner that he is in, rather than looking for bright lights.”
All of this groundwork has given USC’s master salesman something to work with. The new California Science Center and other improvements to Exposition Park have helped USC redefine its location. It now markets itself not as a school in South-Central L.A., but as one of the bookends of a thriving arts and cultural corridor that runs down Figueroa Street to downtown. Williams College President Morton Owen Schapiro, a Sample admirer, says, “Steve has managed to relocate USC from the ghetto of South-Central Los Angeles to the edge of vibrant downtown L.A.--without moving an inch.”
Sample has high aspirations for USC: as a much bigger player in Los Angeles, as a leader of an association of Pacific Rim universities he co-founded, of major research institutions nationwide. USC’s path to prominence, he says, will be its own. “I don’t want USC to be the Harvard of the West or the Stanford of the South. That’s a loser approach. You can’t copy your way into excellence. I want USC to be widely regarded as one of the very best universities in the United States.” He thinks a moment and then adds: “And not only regarded as that, but, in fact, to be one of the very, very best.”
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9b760a1e040ca0221a143599e88e7332 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-20-me-23918-story.html | Gore’s Tamale Break Thrills Deli Owners | Gore’s Tamale Break Thrills Deli Owners
It was well after lunch, but Al Gore was hungry. So the vice president showed up at Carrillo’s Tortilleria and Mexican Deli to try the famous tamales.
Manager and co-owner William Luna said he was busy with customers Tuesday at lunchtime when a Gore security man came in, alerting him that the vice president would be stopping by later. Soon Secret Service agents with bomb sniffing German shepherds were canvassing the business and police were closing off nearby streets.
Meanwhile, Luna called his sister, Yvonne Cruz, to tell her to come over.
“I didn’t believe him. I thought it was a joke,” said Cruz, also a manager at the family owned business, but she rushed over from her Sylmar home. “Nothing like that happens around here.”
About 3 p.m. an entourage of Secret Service agents, San Fernando police and CHP officers, Gore staffers and reporters entered the restaurant at 1242 Pico St.
Staffers at the office of Rep. Howard Berman (D-Mission Hills) had suggested to Gore’s presidential campaign staff that they stop in the San Fernando Valley and eat at the restaurant, said Berman’s district director Robert Blumenfield.
“We knew of it slightly before it happened. It was an off-the-record event. There was no guarantee he would stop by,” Blumenfield said.
With camera flashes erupting like lightning bolts, Cruz said she thought she was at a fancy film premiere. The chaos reminded her of harried customers flocking to Carrillo’s over the holidays.
“Only in Christmas time do we get a mad dash for tamales,” Cruz said. The store has been selling homemade corn tortillas for more than half a century.
Gore ordered the pork tamales in sauce with rice and beans, Cruz said. But the vice president stuck around for only half an hour. “Gore was starting to eat and he couldn’t finish,” Cruz lamented. “People were taking pictures and shaking his hand.”
The restaurant refused to charge Gore for his meal, but the vice president handed over to the family a big tip--a $20 bill that he signed. He also posed for a photo with Cruz, Luna and other relatives.
“It’s like once in a lifetime that someone that high up in office, maybe our future president, shows up,” Luna said.
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023fea972e00432fc1bf59be65c5ea40 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-22-me-25219-story.html | Gherman S. Titov; Cosmonaut Was Second Man to Orbit Earth | Gherman S. Titov; Cosmonaut Was Second Man to Orbit Earth
Russia’s towering cosmonaut hero Gherman S. Titov, the second man in orbit and the first to stay in space more than a day, died Wednesday while taking a sauna in his Moscow apartment. He was 65.
Titov, who was considered Russia’s greatest living space legend, died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Police were treating his death as accidental, although no reason was given for the presence of the gas in the sauna.
Titov was part of the 20-member team of test pilots who trained at Star City near Moscow in preparation for the first manned spaceflight in 1961. Each desperately hoped to be the first person in space.
After the team was slimmed down to six, Titov and Yuri A. Gagarin were the obvious front-runners, cosmonaut instructor Cesar Solovyov said in a 1996 interview. Titov was brighter, more inquisitive and more active, even reciting poetry in the training chamber, Solovyov said, but became backup cosmonaut for the pioneering flight, in part, because Gagarin had a winning, handsome smile.
News reports of the day said Titov was so delighted to hear that Gagarin had been selected that he jumped for joy, hugging and kissing his comrade.
But the reports were untrue, Titov said many years later. “Of course I didn’t jump into his arms. I just stood there for a few moments. I understood quite well that I had the same training level as Gagarin. Naturally, I was disappointed. Until the last moment I had hoped to be the one,” he said in the interview, in 1996.
The decision to send Gagarin into space in the Vostok 1 craft was announced just days before the April 12 launch, but it was not until two days after the 108-minute flight that Titov understood that the feat had made Gagarin immortal.
“The historical significance became clear only on April 14, when we were invited onto [Moscow’s] Red Square and I saw an ocean of people screaming, smiling, all happy, singing songs,” he recalled in an interview last year.
Missing out on the first manned flight was a lifelong regret, but the disappointment gradually ebbed. It did not mar a highly distinguished career in the Soviet space industry.
During his own flight in August 1961, the 25-year-old Titov orbited the Earth 17 times in the Vostok 2 and was in space for 25 hours and 18 minutes. He was the first man to sleep in space. He was also the first to experience space sickness, though he concealed the fact from mission control during the flight.
“He was the living symbol of Russian achievements in space,” a close friend, Alexei A. Leonov, told The Times on Thursday.
“But sometimes he couldn’t conceal his true feelings about it; sometimes he would reveal a kind of sadness that he was the second and not the first,” said Leonov, the first man to walk in space.
Between the first two Soviet flights, U.S. astronauts Alan Shepard and Virgil “Gus” Grissom managed 15-minute suborbital flights.
After Gagarin’s death in a plane crash in 1968, Titov became the Soviet Union’s greatest surviving cosmonaut. Unwilling to risk the death of another hero, authorities canceled a planned second mission for Titov, another cause for regret.
Titov was born Sept. 11, 1935, in the Altai Territory near Kazakhstan. After his space mission he continued to test-fly aircraft, among them the MIG-21, 23 and 27.
He was appointed deputy chief of a space research and design institute in 1972, joined the Defense Ministry in 1976 and went on to become first deputy commander of Military Space Forces, retiring in 1991.
Titov was elected to the lower house of parliament in 1995 as a Communist Party delegate. He wrote several books on spaceflight and was awarded the highest Soviet award, Hero of the Soviet Union.
Titov’s father was a village teacher who imbued his son with a passion for literature and music.
“Gherman Titov knew by heart almost the whole of [Alexander] Pushkin’s works. He knew lots of poems by other poets as well. He was one of the most well-read people I have ever met,” Leonov said.
“We were great friends; we understood each other totally,” he added. “I will never forget our parties with him and the joy his presence gave to others and to me. He made wonderful jokes, recited poetry and sang songs.”
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6e9bc304f9814214efdb543617bd5c78 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-24-ca-25856-story.html | When Cher Titles an Album ‘Not Commercial,’ She Means It | When Cher Titles an Album ‘Not Commercial,’ She Means It
With all the national debate about warning stickers on CDs, Cher is planning to label her next album as not being appropriate for kids.
Maybe she should think about adding another caveat: Not appropriate for most Cher fans.
In a music and acting career that’s been full of surprising twists and turns for more than three decades, Cher is making one of the most unexpected in November when she releases “Not Commercial,” an album that will be her first ever of songs she wrote herself.
It’s not, she stresses, the follow-up to 1998’s “Believe,” the glossy, dance-oriented album that put her back atop international pop music charts. Rather, it’s personal material dealing with topics ranging from time she spent in a Catholic orphanage (the accusatory “Sisters of Mercy”) to her feelings about the death of Kurt Cobain (“The Fall”) to self-recrimination for thoughtlessly stepping over a homeless woman on a sidewalk (“Our Lady of San Francisco”).
Much of the music on the album--which will be sold only via the Internet--echoes ‘70s singer-songwriter styles, from “With or Without You,” for example, evoking Elton John, to the yearning ballad “Still.”
“It’s very un-Cher like,” says Cher, who is also preparing an album that will be the follow-up to “Believe” (she expects to start recording in November for a March release). “But if people really knew me, it is very Cher. But it’s so [expletive] dark. I have to put a sticker on it. I don’t want kids buying it. I write like I speak--not exactly like a sailor, but colorful.”
The album was actually written and recorded back in 1994 after Miles Copeland (manager of Sting and founder of I.R.S. Records) invited Cher to attend the semiannual songwriters workshop he hosts at a castle he owns in France.
“I’d been writing poetry for years and years, but never thought of it to be used as music,” she says. “But I’d just written a poem about Kurt Cobain and took it with me and a couple of other things.”
There she met Bruce Roberts, whose writing credits include the 1979 Barbra Streisand-Donna Summer No. 1 duet, “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough),” and Pat MacDonald, formerly of Timbuk 3 which had a big late-'80s hit with “The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades.” With their collaborations, she wrote 10 songs in five days.
In New York after the workshop, she enlisted members of David Letterman’s “Late Show” band and recorded an album in a week, doing her 10 songs plus two others, including “Classified 1-A,” a song by ex-husband Sonny Bono from the early ‘70s protesting the Vietnam War.
It was the growth of the Internet that finally prompted her to release the album, allowing her to make it available to anyone who might be curious without the economic burden and marketplace pressures of a conventional release. Plans are being finalized to have the album sold online only, via ArtistDirect.com.
“I don’t have any expectations,” she says. “I did it for myself, so I’m just sharing it with people who might be interested and don’t really care what reviewers think. And if people like it, they like it, and if they don’t, that’s fine. It’s so personal. But I’ve played it for people and they liked it. Maybe it hits other people’s notes.”
RAGE AROUND THE MACHINE: Representatives of Rage Against the Machine found themselves having to deny rumors that the band’s concerts Sept. 13 and 14 at the Grand Olympic Auditorium would prove to be the politically charged L.A. quartet’s last. Even DJs at KROQ-FM (106.7) reported that the band was breaking up, but Epic Records spokeswoman Lisa Markowitz strongly refuted that claim.
Fueling the rumors were several recent turns of events. Bassist Tim Commerford’s stage-climbing antics at the MTV Video Music Awards were reported to have stirred dissension in the ranks of the band. And then on the day of the first Olympic concert, the band suddenly parted ways with managers Gary Gersh and John Silva after only several months working with them. This is the third managerial team dismissed by Rage in three years.
That came on the heels of the postponement and later the cancellation of the scheduled stadium and arena tour co-headlining with the Beastie Boys (also managed by Gersh and Silva). Beastie Mike D. was injured in a biking accident, but with him healed, the tour was expected to take place in October. It now has been called off altogether.
Backstage at the Olympic, both Commerford and guitarist Tom Morello denied that the MTV incident caused any rifts in the band, and said that the management decision was amicable--an opinion echoed by Silva and Gersh. The musicians also acknowledged that with a political agenda being as strong as a musical one and with four strong-willed members not always in agreement about goals and plans, Rage can be a hard band to manage. And there’s also the matter of the solo album that singer Zack de la Rocha is working on--which has been taken as a sign of problems in the group.
But Commerford and Morello also spoke clearly of a future together as a band, with plans for an album combining live tracks and new studio versions of a wide range of outside material, all recorded by producer Rick Rubin--marking a potential starting point for some new directions.
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bef7e5ffe389fe49691250af6ca0c8d8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-24-wp-26102-story.html | Talent Search Winners? They’re Online | Talent Search Winners? They’re Online
It’s hard to argue with the idea that the company with the best talent wins--or that the best place to find talent is on the Internet. The challenge comes when you actually try to use the Web as a recruiting pipeline.
With more than 1 billion Web pages and 10,000 career sites, finding the perfect hire online might be harder than finding a wedding ring in a sand dune. Worse, most great people already have great jobs.
How do you sort through the millions of people who are hidden within corporate Web sites or who are lingering in databases--people who might never post resumes on job boards, but who are ripe for the picking?
That is the urgent question that recently brought 30 corporate recruiters and executive headhunters to the Empire Room on the 14th floor of the Courtyard Marriott in midtown Manhattan for a two-day seminar from Advanced Internet Recruitment Strategies.
Through its corporate workshops, AIRS has schooled more than 8,000 recruiters in how to use “active sourcing strategies” to find “passive” job candidates on the Web.
Forget everything you thought you knew about finding talent. Forget flipping through Rolodexes, smiling through cold calls and trolling online career sites. “These days, if you aren’t fluent in Boolean syntax, if you can’t peel back a URL or flip and X-ray a Web site, then you’d better think about hanging up your headhunter hat,” explained Bill Craib, senior director of training for AIRS.
Peel back a URL? Flip and X-ray a Web site?
If this language sounds a bit cloak-and-dagger, it’s because the techniques behind it are fiendishly clever. “X-raying,” for instance, lets you look at all of the pages within a company’s Web server that have been indexed by the search engine that you are using, including pages that can’t be accessed through the company’s home page (for example, a page devoted to a hot research and developement project, which just might include a list of the engineers working on the project).
“Flipping” reveals all the pages linked to a given server--and, like X-raying, can lead to lots of nonpublic pages (for example, the customer-support operations of suppliers that a firm does business with).
AIRS says that its techniques are not the human resources equivalent of hacking--that they are perfectly legal and available to all.
“What we’re really teaching people is how to manipulate the Internet so that they can find what they need to--fast,” Craib said. “The biggest challenge recruiters face is how to find people quickly and economically.”
Craib, 37, an affable guy with a disarming gap-toothed grin, knows the woes of recruiting.
Four years ago, he worked briefly as a recruiter for Sanford Rose Associates in Hanover, N.H. It didn’t take him long to loathe some of the unsavory practices of his profession: He hated cold-calling. He hated “ruseing"--bypassing a company’s on-guard receptionist by, say, calling the shipping department and irately demanding to be transferred directly to the vice president of marketing.
Craib knew there had to be a better way. So he turned to the Internet and sought help. He spent hours at a time surfing the help sections of some of the major search engines to figure out faster ways to find people.
“There’s all this information about flipping and X-raying--even though they don’t use those terms.”
Learning how to maneuver through the vast amounts of data that exist on the Web can be daunting. Is it worth the time and effort? Sandra Morris, 25, a research consultant for Unifi Network, formerly a division of PricewaterhouseCoopers, impressed the class with her answer to that question: PWC now finds 90% of its hires through the Internet, uses outside agencies only about 15% of the time and has reduced its cost per hire from $23,000 to $280.
“Everything is on the Internet,” Morris said. “You just have to know how to find it.”
*
Contact Bill Craib at bcraib@airsmail.com, or learn more about AIRS at https://www.airsdirectory.com.
Copyright 2000, Fast Company
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Techniques That Click
Looking for great talent? Don’t hire a headhunter. Instead, let your fingers do the walking. Below are two techniques that Bill Craib of Advanced Internet Recruiting Strategies teaches talent scouts to help them find what they’re looking for on the Web. (Each search engine uses different commands. These are for AltaVista’s advanced-search function.)
*
X-Raying
Shows you what’s really inside a source company by helping you see through walled-off areas of Web sites. Companies link you only to the pages that they want you to see. But search engines index all of the pages on a server, and X-raying can bring you to pages that don’t have public links.
* The command: Host:xyzcompany and keywords. For instance, “host:cisco.com AND business development”
* The result: 77 Web pages, including promotion announcements, executive news, and an article about Mike Volpi, Cisco System’s chief strategy officer
*
Flipping
The Web is simply a series of links between related home pages. Flipping allows you to target a specific destination and can lead you to nonpublic Web pages, such as employee directories and alumni lists.
* The command: Link:xyzcompany and keywords. Looking for a candidate who graduated from Harvard Business School and has experience at Deloitte? “Link:hbs.edu AND Deloitte”
* The result: 141 Web pages, including home pages, biographies, alumni e-mail addresses and Web addresses
Copyright, Fast Company
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9d5fa5f0322b0ab1bf1c760ee02b5da0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-27-ca-27257-story.html | Satiric ‘Best in Show’ Chews Up the World of Dog Competitions | Satiric ‘Best in Show’ Chews Up the World of Dog Competitions
“Best in Show” has both bark and bite. The latest comic mockumentary to be masterminded by director Christopher Guest, its low-key but sharp and amusing sense of humor is a nice fit with the frenetic world of competitive dog shows.
“Best in Show” lists Guest and co-star Eugene Levy as co-writers, but this film, like Guest’s previous “Waiting for Guffman” and the even-earlier “This Is Spinal Tap” (directed by Rob Reiner) are in reality tributes to the art of improvisation. Working within a general outline, cast members play out elaborate riffs that live and die by the amount of inspired byplay the actors can come up with.
Though “Best in Show” is a little more hit-or-miss than its predecessors, it benefits from the energy generated by an actual dog show competition and has enough raucous moments to carry you over the rough spots. And when Fred Willard as TV dog-show commentator Buck Laughlin gets into the act midway through the picture, “Best in Show” really catches fire.
The dog show world is a more obvious target, as well as one with broader popular appeal, than the amateur theatricals of “Guffman” or even the heavy-metal universe of “Tap,’ but the philosophy behind these films remains the same.
Once again, Guest and company focus on accentuating the eccentricities of their characters, in this case the owners of five dogs all intent on taking their animals all the way to the top. That would be winning best of show in Philadelphia’s prestigious Mayflower Dog Show (modeled on the Westminster show in New York), the Mt. Olympus of canine events.
The happy and not so happy owners and their charges cut a wide swath through the human condition. They include:
* Gerry and Cookie Fleck (SCTV alumni Levy and Catherine O’Hara) of Fern City, Fla., who so love their Norwich terrier, Winkie, they’ve written the song “God Loves a Terrier” in his honor. Gerry has two left feet, literally, while Cookie has so many panting ex-beaus that, in a comical running joke, she can’t go anywhere without colliding with one of them.
* Midwesterners Meg and Hamilton Swain (Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock), whose dysfunctional marriage isn’t helped by their dysfunctional Weimaraner Bernice. Though the Swains’ brand-name lifestyle is a a dead-on satire on consumerism, the couple’s incessant bickering is one of the film’s least successful stratagems.
* Wealthy socialite Sherri Ann Cabot (“American Pie’s” Jennifer Coolidge) and her much older husband, Leslie Ward Cabot (Patrick Cranshaw). We share a lot of interests, coos Sherri, “we love soup and the outdoors.” Looking after their dog, two-time best-in-show standard poodle Rhapsody in White, is fanatical handler Christy Cummings (Jane Lynch), who doesn’t quite share Sherri Ann’s passion for makeup as an art form.
* Hair salon owner Stefan Vanderhoof and his flamboyant partner Scott Donlan (John Michael Higgins) are equally committed to their Manhattan lifestyle and their Shih Tzu, Miss Agnes. Vanderhoof is played by longtime Guest collaborator Michael McKean, a long way from his David St. Hubbins character in “Spinal Tap.”
Even further away from his role as “Tap’s” hard-driving Nigel Tufnel is Guest himself, deeply unrecognizable as slow-talking Harlan Pepper of Pine Nut, N.C., owner of both “The Fishin’ Hole” and a noble bloodhound named Hubert. It’s an inspired, juicy part, aided by lines like one thrown at him by a pal as he heads off to Philadelphia: “If you get hungry, eat something.”
Best in this particular show is not any of the owners but the irrepressibly buffoonish play-by-play man, the red-bow-tied Laughlin. Created by Willard, a veteran of both “Tap” and “Waiting for Guffman,” Buck has a breezy bravado that consistently poleaxes his partner, the quite proper Trevor Beckwith (Jim Piddick). “How do they miniaturize dogs, anyway” is one of Buck’s many irresistibly inane ripostes. When this man is on his game, “Best in Show” is being all it can be.
* MPAA rating: PG-13, for language and sex-related material. Times guidelines: suitable for older teens.
‘Best in Show”
Christopher Guest: Harlan Pepper
Eugene Levy: Gerry Fleck
Michael McKean: Stefan Vanderhoof
Parker Posey: Meg Swan
Catherine O’Hara: Cookie Fleck
Fred Willard: Buck Laughlin
A Castle Rock Entertainment presentation, released by Warner Bros. Director Christopher Guest. Producer Karen Murphy. Executive producer Gordon Mark. Screenplay by Christopher Guest & Eugene Levy. Cinematographer Roberto Schaefer. Editor Robert Leighton. Costume designer Monique Prudhomme. Music Jeffery CJ Vanston. Production designer Joseph T. Garrity. Art director Gary Myers . Set decorator Elizabeth Patrick. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.
Exclusively at the Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500 and Loews Broadway, 1441 Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica, (310) 458-1506.
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0a5607dc22a13216aeff8bc2bbe6b867 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-28-me-28008-story.html | Judge Awards Guess Model $450 Million of Oil Estate | Judge Awards Guess Model $450 Million of Oil Estate
A federal bankruptcy judge in Los Angeles awarded Playboy pinup and Guess jeans model Anna Nicole Smith nearly $450 million on Wednesday, finding that she was deprived of the estate her late husband intended to leave her.
Judge Samuel L. Bufford ruled that Smith’s stepson deliberately interfered with her ability to inherit her share of an estimated $2-billion fortune amassed by the richest oilman in Texas. The judge also ruled that Smith was entitled to punitive damages to be calculated later.
Bufford awarded Smith $449,754,134--the amount the stock rose in her late husband’s company, Koch Industries Inc., during their brief marriage.
The ruling comes on the eve of a probate trial in Houston, pitting the 32-year-old Smith, also known as Vickie Lynn Marshall, against her 64-year-old stepson, E. Pierce Marshall. Jury selection already has begun, setting the stage for a Texas soap opera about the May-December romance between a comely dancer and a lonely billionaire.
After J. Howard Marshall II saw Smith at Gigi’s, a Houston topless joint, she became “the light” of his life, according to testimony at a five-day trial in federal court last year.
“I think the most compelling evidence was the testimony that her husband loved her more than any other human being on the planet--to the point where he tried to adopt her and marry her at the same time,” said Smith’s lawyer, Philip W. Boesch Jr.
Lawyers for Pierce Marshall could not be reached.
Smith testified last year that the younger Marshall defrauded her of between $556 million and $820 million she was entitled to as her share of her late husband’s estate.
The judge agreed that her husband had every intention of taking care of Smith after his death.
Her victory in bankruptcy court is but a first step in a complex legal scenario. It declares her right to inherit from Marshall’s estate, and says she can claim any future inheritance as a personal asset. In effect, the ruling clears the way for her to claim half of the Marshall fortune in Texas probate court.
“There is no doubt in this case that Vickie Lynn Marshall has an expectancy to receive a substantial portion of J. Howard Marshall II’s wealth after his death,” Bufford found. “Marshall repeatedly told her that she would receive half of what he owned after his death. However, [he] never made a will with any provision for her.”
And she never signed a prenuptial agreement.
The court battle has lasted far longer than the marriage did--four years versus 14 months.
He was almost 90 on June 27, 1994, the day Smith married a man she called “Paw Paw” at the White Dove wedding chapel in Houston. She wore a white-beaded gown and curlers in her hair. He wore a white tuxedo as he slipped a 22-carat diamond onto her finger. They celebrated their union by releasing two white doves. Then off she went--alone--to a photo shoot in Greece.
As Health Fails, Estate Fight Begins
A few months later, the elder Marshall’s health began to fail. Enter Pierce Marshall, who referred to his stepmother as “Miss Cleavage.”
He asked the court to appoint him his father’s legal guardian, then froze all the money in the accounts.
“Upon learning of his father’s marriage,” Bufford wrote, “Pierce Marshall took quick action to assure that this did not interfere with his own expectation that he and his family would inherit all of his father’s wealth.” The judge found that the stepson consulted attorneys, who advised him on how to “preserve his own entitlement to the entire estate and to cut Vickie Lynn Marshall out of any inheritance.”
He tried to cut her out of the family trust by inducing his father to sign a document called the “J. Howard Marshall II Post Nuptial Fine Tuning of Estate Plan.” Then, the judge found, Pierce Marshall altered that document.
In a written opinion, the judge sharply criticized the younger Marshall for such tactics, finding that he not only altered some documents but concealed or refused to turn over others. Court-imposed sanctions had little effect, considering billions of dollars were at stake, the judge observed.
As her husband’s condition worsened, Smith also sought refuge in the courts, demanding financial support from trusts controlled by Pierce Marshall. At one point, the electricity was turned off at the couple’s mansion because the utility bills weren’t being paid.
The rivals accused the other of exerting undue influence over a vulnerable old man. And when the elder Marshall died, they fought in court over his ashes, which were divided between them. They held separate funerals.
On the sidelines was another Marshall son, J. Howard Marshall III, who had been disinherited by his father years earlier over a business dispute. He owns a Los Angeles electronics company and also is suing for a portion of his father’s money.
He rallied for Smith at her bankruptcy trial, offering testimony that supported her claim that his father wanted Smith cared for after his death.
“He was clearly very attracted to Vickie,” he testified. “He referred to her as ‘the light of my life.’ ”
During his turn on the stand, Pierce Marshall was confronted with a series of letters he had written his father. In one, he accused his father of “profiting for yourself” and “throwing your family to the wolves.”
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f5e84130b077339273044eb37241bd7b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-29-me-28691-story.html | Little Saigon Raids Dismantle Crime Ring, Authorities Say | Little Saigon Raids Dismantle Crime Ring, Authorities Say
Federal and local authorities said Thursday that they have dismantled Orange County’s largest Asian organized crime syndicate, which supplied the majority of illegal gambling machines in the county.
In a predawn raid in Little Saigon, authorities arrested 15 people. The alleged gang leader, Son Thanh Nguyen, 32, already was in custody on a weapons charge. Nguyen, authorities said, masterminded a sophisticated operation that installed “stealth” video games in cafes. With the flip of a switch, the machines offer illegal gambling.
The machines are fixtures in most of Little Saigon’s Vietnamese cafes, authorities said, and are proliferating in outlying cities. Gang members, they said, often threaten merchants who refused to allow them to set up the machines.
“I truly believe that the Little Saigon community will be a better place to live,” said FBI Supervisory Special Agent Randy D. Parsons. “The syndicate was involved in a significant amount of loan-sharking [and] Ecstasy trafficking as well as illegal gambling.”
Police said they believe the gambling attracted other crime, including loan-sharking and extortion. The FBI estimated that the gang received more than $300,000 a year from the video machines alone, though police say the amount may have reached the millions.
The crackdown is part of a larger effort to curtail organized crime emanating from Little Saigon. The gang’s criminal activities, police said, were typical of other gangs whose reach extends across states and sometimes around the world. Westminster Police Chief James Cook said the problem is so serious that the department now has an investigator in Vietnam.
Investigators Used Wiretaps, Informants
“Because of the refugee settlement in our city, the Little Saigon area, the tentacles of crime from that area spread out across the country and around the world,” Cook said.
The arrests cap a one-year FBI investigation that used wiretaps and community sources to infiltrate the syndicate.
In addition to the gambling counts, gang members were charged with running an international ring trafficking in the “club drug” Ecstasy. Nguyen also was charged with weapons possession in connection with an alleged plot to kill rival gang members.
The investigation focused on the wiretapped conversations between Nguyen and an Anaheim video game dealer allegedly used by the ring to rig regular video games with illicit electronic components. With a flip of a remote control switch, video games like Pac-Man would be replaced on the screen by illegal games of chance with names such as “Dancing Dolls.”
The machines accepted quarters and bills up to $20; winners normally claimed the money from the cafe or restaurant operator because the machines don’t dispense cash.
Authorities say the machines were big moneymakers. They cost $2,300 apiece and generate up to $150,000 annually, they said.
A major breakthrough in the case came when FBI agents were able to build identical remote controls to activate the machines. Screens switched to video games by merchants at the sight of police were quickly flipped back.
“We were able to mimic their frequency,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Marc Greenberg. “When a merchant hit a remote to Pac-Man, we would switch it back to the gambling game.”
The suspects face possible five-year prison terms on the gambling charges. The drug charges also could yield five-year terms.
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dea4734ab375d092ee324abac24c34f1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-06-ca-47418-story.html | ‘Pokemon 3 The Movie’: Far From a Gold Version | ‘Pokemon 3 The Movie’: Far From a Gold Version
Two Tylenol and a pair of earplugs might be enough to get you through “Pokemon 3The Movie.”
The movie is a 75-minute sensory assault. The animated world of Pokemon land crystallizes and morphs into one reality after another. The Pokemon themselves screech and roar as they do battle. Sure, it holds kids’ attention. The noise alone prevents them from forming any other complete thought.
Which is just as well, because “Pokemon 3,” subtitled “Spell of the Unown,” doesn’t hold up to much thinking, even by 8-year-olds. Like its predecessors, “Pokemon 3" was adapted from a preexisting Japanese film by producer Norman J. Grossfeld and American director Michael Haigney. But a lot seems to get lost in the translation.
Pokemon master Ash Ketchum (voiced by Veronica Taylor) and his pals this time face the aforementioned Unown, a swirling mess of glyphs that wreak havoc with reality. They seem to have tapped into the grief of 5-year-old Molly, whose father has been sucked into the Unown while doing research. Drawing on her imagination, they turn her hometown into an ice palace and give her a giant stylized lion named Entei as a surrogate father.
It’s all an elaborate and nonsensical setup to get to a few Pokemon battles when Ash or one of his cohorts, Misty and Brock, pull out their pocket monsters like so many marbles and engage in their ritualized form of fighting. It’s dark and scary stuff, and despite a G rating, could easily be too intense for younger kids.
For parents, the crystallized world at least makes the animation more interesting than the flat, uninspired TV landscape. The disadvantage is that as a battle rages between Entei and Ash’s Pokemon, that world cracks and crashes. Loudly. Nonstop. People who have never given sound design a moment’s thought will suddenly understand why people get Oscars for it.
The movie is preceded by the 22-minute short “Pikachu and Pichu,” eye candy so dull that it makes the main feature seem intellectually stimulating.
For the hard-core Pokemon player, the movie introduces several gold- and silver-series characters--ones who were added in new versions of the video games.
There are more than 250 Pokemon so far. That means that--if, as the Pokemon theme song says, you gotta get ‘em all--this franchise might last until 2035.
* MPAA rating: G. Times guidelines: Theme of disappearing parents, vicious battles are inappropriate for kids under 5.
‘Pokemon 3 The Movie:
Spell of the Unown’
Veronica Taylor: Ash Ketchum
Rachael Lillis: Misty/Jesse
Eric Stuart: Brock/James
Maddie Blaustein: Molly
Ikue Otani: Pikachu
Kids’ WB presents a 4Kids Entertainment production. Directors Kunihiko Yuyama (Japan) and Michael Haigney (U.S.). Producer Norman J. Grossfeld. Screenwriters Takeshi Shudo and Hideki Sonoda. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes.
In general release.
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10d2e9a580e3c7e68c48608258a99d92 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-06-me-47737-story.html | Man Denies Guilt in Pornography Case | Man Denies Guilt in Pornography Case
South Bay political consultant Tom Shortridge appeared in court Thursday, pleading not guilty to a felony charge of using a minor for sexual acts and misdemeanor charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and child molestation.
The charges stem from allegations that he took pornographic photos of two teenage girls in December. If convicted on all charges, he could face up to six years in prison, Assistant Dist. Atty. Warren Kato said.
Shortridge, 35, was arraigned before Torrance Municipal Court Judge Thomas Solokov. He was released on $20,000 bail, and a preliminary hearing is set for May 16.
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5f576126bc6ec09ead46c5907682b87b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-09-ca-48703-story.html | An Unblinking Eye on Capitol Hill | An Unblinking Eye on Capitol Hill
In his 22 years on television in this mecca of self-promotion, Brian Lamb has not once uttered his own name.
In his hourlong interview show “Booknotes” each week, Lamb appears on camera for about four minutes. His guest gets the other 56.
And when Capitol Hill’s gossipy social season rolls around, Lamb is not among the congressmen, Cabinet secretaries and celebrity journalists who gather to drop names and rub elbows.
If you’re wondering how anyone could possibly run a TV network this way in an environment so conducive to bluster over substance, then you just don’t understand Lamb or C-SPAN, the cable network he founded in 1979.
You’d hardly be alone in your ignorance. At certain hours of certain days, when C-SPAN cameras lock onto members of Congress droning about bureaucrats and trade quotas, Lamb’s troika of channels--C-SPANS 1 and 2, plus the new C-SPAN 3--may rank among the most unwatched in America.
Even when things get more interesting, you’re liable to find a talking head on all three screens--someone either making a speech, joining a discussion or answering questions, all presented in the TV equivalent of a plain brown wrapper. No fancy graphics or catchy logos. No whooshing sound effects or blaring trumpets. No chatty panel of Sam, Cokie and George to tell us what we’ve just seen.
This kind of television tends to be an acquired taste. But the estimated 28 million viewers who’ve developed an appetite should know that Lamb, 59, is the main reason C-SPAN looks and sounds the way it does.
“He’s the tone-setter,” says John Splaine, a University of Maryland professor who gets paid to help keep C-SPAN as objective as possible. “He knew exactly what he wanted to do, and he wanted to be fair and accurate.”
As tone-setters go, Lamb offers a subdued monotone. He has been called the Jack Webb of journalism, a just-the-facts straight man in an opinionated crowd of ambushers and noisemakers. On screen, his persona is as flat and colorless as his home state of Indiana, although around the office he’s more like a collegial headmaster, chatty and amiable, yet demanding objectivity from co-workers even when they talk politics by the water cooler.
Lamb started C-SPAN when he was a Washington bureau chief for Cablevision magazine in the late 1970s. He didn’t much like what he saw on the three major networks or the way they were monopolizing nationwide news delivery, capturing about 65% of the viewing public with their nightly reports.
“They became enormously powerful--in my opinion, too powerful--in a country that prided itself on diversity and choice.”
He also didn’t like much about the way the media and the government cozied up to each other in Washington. Lamb had come to town in 1965, a Purdue University graduate who’d joined the Navy and taken a public affairs job at the Pentagon, where he got his first look at this odd relationship.
Such practices persist, and they’re still a pet peeve for Lamb. When reviewing the day’s newspaper highlights on a recent “Washington Journal,” C-SPAN’s morning news and phone-in show, he referred to a story quoting a “senior administration official.”
“We may never know who the senior official is,” he said in a neutral tone, flipping to the next story.
He left the Pentagon in 1967, taking a job at a TV station in his hometown of Lafayette, Ind., but the next year he was back in Washington as a radio reporter. He later worked as a press aide to a U.S. senator, a staffer in the telecommunications office of the Nixon White House and then as the Cablevision bureau chief.
His idea was to get the cable industry, just coming into its own thanks to deregulation, to foot the bill and provide channel space for a public-service network offering live broadcasts of proceedings on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Let the public watch the legislative sausage being made and judge for itself.
And beyond that? Well, C-SPAN would do much more someday, Lamb always believed. But it’s hard to imagine what made him so optimistic when you look back to its humble beginnings.
“We had no cameras [those belonged to Congress], no tape recorders, no nothing,” Lamb says. It was just him and three employees in an apartment on the Virginia side of the Potomac. They had one phone line and shared satellite time with basketball games and professional wrestling, working with an annual budget of $450,000. Initially some cable systems wanted nothing to do with them.
Thus was the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network born on March 19, 1979, with a broadcast from the House floor. Only 3.5 million households were hooked up, and it’s impossible to say how many dozens actually tuned in.
But before long, this bland cable beast was growing like some giant mushroom in the dark--buying cameras, adding employees, beginning a phone-in show, creating a second channel with broadcasts from the U.S. Senate, adding programming from committee hearings, state governments, the British House of Commons.
Still, no one was sure if anyone was really paying attention until the mid-'80s, when an obscure Georgia congressman named Newt Gingrich began stepping regularly before House cameras to deliver diatribes against the Democrats. The House chamber was often empty at the time, but Gingrich wasn’t speaking to his colleagues. He was speaking to the viewers of C-SPAN, and when he began to gain a measure of fame, everyone else in Washington at last awakened to the presence of the big mushroom at their feet.
Perhaps C-SPAN viewers weren’t numerous, but they were keeping up with the issues, and they were voting--about 90% of them, according to surveys--and today C-SPAN is available to 78 million households on 6,500 cable systems, broadcasting around the clock on three channels.
About 275 staffers fill its Capitol Hill offices, working with an annual budget of $40 million. Cable companies still foot the bill, at a rate of pennies per subscriber, and C-SPAN now finds itself quietly at the vanguard of a cable news revolution, continuously feeding a small but significant portion of the public with an insatiable appetite for information.
“My main goal in life was to open the process up so everybody could be heard in one way or another,” Lamb says. “And that’s happened.”
Lamb has a C-SPAN sort of life--subdued and uncluttered. He is a bachelor living alone in an Arlington townhouse, an early-to-bed, early-to-rise type who watches little television.
“Here, everybody’s going somewhere. They’re ambitious, they’re trying to control their image. And you can’t have, very often, a genuine friendship with anybody in public life. You can’t trust it.
“I’ve never received a call from a public official that I thought was anything but official. You can’t ever let your guard down and think that this is a friendship, and it shouldn’t be anyway.”
If Lamb is proudest of any one thing, it is that C-SPAN offers a voice for the voiceless. Even callers who seem one step removed from the asylum generally can have their say before Lamb and other hosts answer with a neutral, “OK, thanks.”
In watching Lamb as he calmly shepherds callers, you will be hard-pressed to detect his own political leanings. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) joked while appearing on a Lamb phone-in show last July that he too had been unable to solve the mystery of the man’s party affiliation.
“Actually,” McCain quipped to a caller, “I think he’s a vegetarian.”
Lamb moved on to the next item without saying a word.
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978f53f6d461d5977336f606dd71890b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-14-me-51033-story.html | Charles Bailey; a Tuskegee Airman in World War II | Charles Bailey; a Tuskegee Airman in World War II
Charles Bailey, 82, who helped break racial barriers as one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen. Bailey was one of the 1,000 members of the highly decorated all-black squadron of the Army Air Corps. The first black pilots to break racial barriers and fly in combat, the Tuskegee Airmen escorted U.S. bombers on missions during World War II and never lost a single plane. Bailey found the route to his dream of becoming a pilot while a student at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Fla., where college founder Mary McLeod Bethune arranged his transfer to the training center at the Army air base at Tuskegee, Ala. He flew 133 missions over Europe and North Africa, and received an Air Medal and a Distinguished Flying Cross. After the war, Bailey worked as an educator and undertaker. A victim of Alzheimer’s disease, he was missing for a few days last year when he wandered from his home. Searchers called his name in the nearby woods but got a response only when one of them shouted, “Do you know anything about the Tuskegee Airmen?” Bailey, dehydrated and hungry but otherwise all right, replied, “Yes.” On Monday in Deland, Fla.
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a5ee9308c185f16dd523a823c56726ff | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-15-bk-51102-story.html | DISCOVERIES | DISCOVERIES
HONEYMOON And Other Stories By Kevin Canty Nan Talese/Doubleday: 162 pp., $21
The stories in this collection have the lanky, loose connection to the world that an adolescent might have, complicated but unexplained. A middle-aged aunt is sent by her family to help her nephew in his 20s confront his various addictions. She’s been through it herself, but instead of teaching him the error of his ways, she has sex with him, takes him out drinking and helps him buy some crystal meth. A man falls in love with a woman dying of breast cancer. He knows he shouldn’t, but he does. Two guests at a wedding ease the loss of their lover (one is bisexual) by drinking all night and sleeping with each other. “‘You think I’m drunk enough to sleep with you?’ she asks him. ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I don’t think so.’ ‘You think I’m lonely enough?”’ That seems to be the source of action in many of these stories. Are you lonely enough? Am I lonely enough? Otherwise, God knows, it would never happen. These are not stories in which huge revelations create momentum that changes lives. These are stories in which action is taken one step at a time. “I am,” the narrator says in the first story, “Tokyo, My Love,” 'the thing that happens next to you.”
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THE BAY OF ANGELS By Anita Brookner Random House: 206 pp., $23.95
One of Anita Brookner’s favorite subjects, in this and other books, is dignity, that source of salvation for many, that sometimes destructive goal. Whether it makes a character fatally lonely or helps him survive suffering, it is a thing to be played out in fiction’s laboratory so that we can decide how and whether to pursue it ourselves. First of all, dignity is excruciating. To dissect it successfully, an author must observe its creation and destruction. It cannot be mistaken for cowardice or plain arrogance or even fortitude. It is something the author creates with the raw materials of his or her character’s lives.
Zoe and her mother live alone, quietly and happily in a shabby but charming flat in 1950s London, capital of shabbiness, citadel of dignity. Zoe’s father has died and her mother is completely isolated. When Zoe is 16, her mother finally meets a much older man who takes her to live with him in France. Zoe is on her own until her stepfather dies and she must go to Nice to care for her mother, dying in a nursing home. The path seems paved for a dignified spinsterhood. Whenever she reaches out for help, sorting out financial affairs or asking medical advice of her mother’s doctor, she perceives herself to be unattractive. She retreats to a rented room or a quiet museum. That is all that happens. “The Bay of Angels” is the story of a small life, lacking ambition or high drama. A girl whose prime comes and passes. A plain Jane who uses words like “apotheosis” and “avid” to describe her life, a life in which sex, well, it’s fine if you can get it.
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OUR TWISTED HERO By Yi Munyol Hyperion: 122 pp., $21.95
The ability, often childlike, to control the minds and actions of others without using force is a source of fascination for fiction writers and politicians alike. How to crawl inside the needs of another human being and then use the fear of deprivation to control him? Better still, to create those needs and then control the source of their fulfillment. Now, that’s power. And it is perversion. The minds and souls of the master and the slave are hopelessly intertwined. They drag each other down. They destroy each other.
The narrator of “Our Twisted Hero” is Han Pyongt’ae, remembering back 30 years to when he was 12 and had moved from the sophisticated city of Seoul to a country town because of a nameless shame in his father’s civil service career. Still, he expects to enter his new school a prince among commoners. Instead, he is met with a political structure that holds his class of 60 students in a corrupt and well-entrenched fist. The entire class is ruled by the class monitor, Om Sokdae, who is taller and stronger and more able than most of the boys and has the full support of a tired teacher who appreciates the order and turns a blind eye to the bullying and theft and cheating that Sokdae insists upon.
The background to this story, we are told briefly, is the end of the Liberal Party government. Pyongt’ae graduates into Korea’s brave new “salesman’s era” (Sokdae eventually is, found out and punished, but the boys in the class are punished even more for their submissiveness) and reflects often on Sokdae’s misguided charisma and the pathetic submissiveness of his classmates and himself. Pyongt’ae enters a business world in which, he reflects, “Om Sokdae would certainly have become class monitor again.”
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cfbe8a1d4f6d17d63ac92650580772dc | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-15-ca-51090-story.html | Will We Dance to His Tunes? | Will We Dance to His Tunes?
Outside the rear door at the BBC Radio Theatre, there’s an air of restless tension. A gaggle of girls giggles. A pack of paparazzi prowls. A parked Mercedes purrs discreetly.
Suddenly, a shout: “He’s round the front!” Fans and photographers run for it. The moment they’ve gone 50 yards, the stage door crashes open and the slender figure of Craig David, shepherded by security, darts toward the car, slides into the rear seat.
The girls scream, the paparazzi curse and Britain’s brightest 19-year-old pop star laughs merrily. An old trick, but it worked.
Already renowned as both a motor-mouth and a paragon of good manners, David thanks the driver for anticipating that he would need a bottle of water and apologizes for being rather sweaty from recording his spot for the biannual TV charity extravaganza Comic Relief. Then, as the car makes for the motorway and a two-hour drive to that night’s gig in Bournemouth, he’s straight down to business.
David jokes about the burry South Coast vowels and R sounds that color his accent (‘I sound like a farmer’), but his high-energy phraseology is littered with “focus,” 'demographic” and “that’s key!” Not to mention the sanguine assessment that, in music industry terms, “every artist is a commodity and if you aren’t making money you will be dropped. It’s not that they have a love and passion for you.” That’s from someone with 4 million in worldwide sales of his debut album, “Born to Do It,” in nine months (it won’t be out in the U.S. until July).
This then is the formidable youth who scored more kudos than any other artist at the recent Brit Awards (the U.K. answer to the Grammys). Remarkably, he did it without winning any of the six categories in which he had been nominated. Instead, icons of all rock generations spoke up in spontaneous sympathy with someone they recognized as a musical peer.
“If there is a better singer in Britain, then I’m Margaret Thatcher,” said Elton John. Bono wove a verse of David’s hit “Walking Away” into U2’s song “One.” Noel Gallagher and Robbie Williams weighed in too.
David admits he’s still basking in the warm glow. The megastar embrace was particularly pleasing to an artist who, despite roots in underground dance sounds and major influences in the likes of R. Kelly, greatly admires the crafted mainstream work of such stars as Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Christina Aguilera.
But then David is in that uncomplicated early phase of his career when compliments rain down like overripe fruit. Atlantic Records won a bidding war to license him for the U.S., and the label’s vice president in charge of marketing, Ron Shapiro, proclaims: “As a 19-year-old, his talent is incomparable: an extraordinary songwriter, very personable, a great live performer, great to look at, and unbelievably centered and driven. He’s absolutely on a mission.” Blimey, as Brits say.
Nonetheless, David’s ego seems startlingly well-balanced and controlled. Already committed to basing himself in the States for the rest of 2001, he reasons that his European triumph counts for nothing in the U.S.: “I’m at square one. You have to go in, do the hard work, slog, make each radio station feel that they’ve ‘found’ you. I’m going to hit them with a secret weapon.”
He’s smiling, but maybe he does have one: two-step/U.K. garage, the now-indistinguishably blended dance genres that he and producer Mark Hill’s production team, Artful Dodger, have taken from their seaport hometown of Southampton to a fair chunk of the world the past 18 months.
The David definition?
“It’s a hybrid of R&B; and house-garage where you take the bass drum off the second and fourth beats of the bar. That gives a unique skipping feel.”
Skipping is right. If not exactly a vehicle for soul-searching, the light, uplifting sparkle of two-step seems a perfect match for David’s character and ultra-positive story-so far.
In rock ‘n’ roll’s vast catalog of significant artists from broken homes-John Lennon through Kurt Cobain to Eminem-Craig David may prove to be one who emerged undamaged. His father, George, a black carpenter from Grenada in the Caribbean, and his mother, Tina, a white English shop assistant, separated when he was 8. Yet David recounts nothing but happy memories.
“I didn’t even really know that they’d broken up properly,” he says, sipping from his bottled water as the car continues through the rolling countryside. “It was just, like, my dad wasn’t staying at home anymore. But I saw him almost every day. They maintained a sense of security around me. I knew who I was.”
While living with his mother in their local housing authority apartment (until this year), David spent a lot of time with the West Indian side of the family and took to multicultural life as naturally as breathing. He made the best of everything, talking his way out of any trouble while never evading his racial identity-at 15, the first track he recorded with Mark Hill was his own ‘Let’s Kick Racism out of Football,” commissioned by the town’s Premier League soccer club.
Music flowed through his life. His mother brought him up on her eclectic favorites, the Osmonds and Terence Trent D’Arby. His father played bass in an obscure band, but more pertinently he ran a West Indian social club in Southampton. As a kid, the hyper-verbal David started picking up the DJ’s mike to toast and rap. Before long, he was MC-ing around town and earning about $150 a week-riches he partly invested in a bedroom mini-studio.
There, songwriting simply flowed from his MC experience. He compares improvising a lyric and melody live to the way a grand prix driver at 200 mph sees everything in slow motion. His rough demos soon caught the ear of Hill, 10 years older than David, a club DJ himself and the owner of a local studio.
It was the start of a beautiful friendship. They kicked ideas around until that Southampton sound took shape and, out of nowhere, during Christmastime in 1999, they had the U.K.'s No. 2 single with “Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta),” credited to Artful Dodger with Craig David.
At which point David’s whole life hit 200 mph and stayed there. Instantly the most courted solo artist in Britain, he signed to independent label Wildstar because he liked the way boss Colin Lester respected his vision.
While he and Hill were still recording the album, interest picked up across the Atlantic. For one, the then-Puff Daddy rang him and offered to fly him to New York on the Concorde, according to David. But David politely refused, determined to stick with Hill and Southampton.
“We’re these guys from the outskirts, we write differently because we’re from a different place,” he asserts. “A lot of people wanted to put me with the hottest producers and I was saying, ‘It’s not about the hottest producers, it’s about the songs I’m writing. I’ve got a good thing going on with Mark, why change it?”’
He smiles, vindicated by gold and platinum records in 21 countries since July.
Craig Kalman, the Atlantic vice president who signed him, agrees that the noninterference policy must be maintained in the U.S.: “We have to preserve and protect and champion his own creation.”
The U.S. campaign launched last week with the release of a new video for David’s first U.K. chart-topping single and self-styled party piece, “Fill Me In.” The album comes out July 31, and a club tour with his excellent eight-man band is scheduled for the autumn-the crunch, according to Wildstar’s Lester, because “Craig’s got to convince America. It’s not about prancing around being a pop star, it’s about delivering live what you’ve delivered on record.”
That should suit David fine if he can sustain the quality of the concert he plays to a full house of 4,000 in Bournemouth. Very much at home in Bournemouth, the next big seaside resort east of Southampton, David bounds like an antelope through freewheeling two-steppers “Re-Rewind,” 'Last Night” and “Fill Me In,” and sexes up the smoochy hits “7 Days,” 'Follow Me” and “Walking Away.” Teenage erogenous zones are teased. Girls twirl thongs round their heads and hurl them at his feet. Still it seems very innocent.
As does the star himself backstage, relaxed, off-duty and mother-henned by one and all. After he’s had supper, the road manager drops by to worry at the tour caterers: “Did he eat properly tonight? He mustn’t skip meals, you know, he’ll get ill.”
He walks away beaming when the chef reports that their boy downed three bowls of soup, two chicken breasts and a plate of beans and mashed potatoes.
Meanwhile, the star has moved on to another weighty concern: styling his beard. “I’m not a vain person, but it takes about 30 minutes to perfect the symmetry,” he says with a smile. “Electric shaver, razor, tweezers, all that going on. If you want to go out there and look good, you have to put in the hours.”
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a21dadb776d5d14654ea70cc29f307d1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-15-me-51304-story.html | It’s Time to End the Sad Saga of Silt-Clogged Matilija Dam | It’s Time to End the Sad Saga of Silt-Clogged Matilija Dam
Ventura County has not had great luck with dams. Not only did we suffer a huge loss of lives and property along the Santa Clara River from the collapse of the St. Francis Dam in March 1928 but Matilija Dam near Ojai has failed miserably to live up to the projections of its backers.
According to Frederico Barajas of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the dam’s reservoir will be fully choked with sediment by the end of this decade, rendering it useless against a flood. With a few more wet winters like the one just passed, the dam’s usefulness could be gone even sooner.
Last month the muddy creek overflowed the dam at an estimated 7,500 cubic feet per second. The marvelous thing about such floods is the way they refresh and remake the creek beds.
To see Matilija Creek after this spring cleaning, I strolled out to look at the battered dam and its nearly filled-in reservoir. After 25 inches of rain, the skies were clear, the hills smudged with the fresh growth of spring and the willows a haze of soaring green bud wood. Despite the smothering growth of the monstrous weed arundo donax at its muddy edges, the stream was clear and cobbled and sparkling in the sun.
The history of Matilija Dam has been well documented, both in an evaluation prepared for Ventura County in 1999 and by Ventura native and river advocate Ed Henke. Both show that experts in the field--including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers--were united against the dam from the start.
California’s Department of Fish and Game feared that the dam would imperil the thousands of steelhead trout that once surged up the river each spring, so thick that Supervisor John Flynn recalls them bumping against his legs as he waded in the water as a boy. The dam did not even include a fish ladder in its original design and attempts to add one were not successful, one reason why steelhead are now endangered species.
The California Division of Water Resources doubted that the dam would, as promoted, produce much water for Ojai residents and farmers. In fact the dam holds less than half the 1,900 acre-feet that advocates estimated it would. Because of rapid sedimentation from steep Matilija Creek, in a few years it will produce no water at all.
The 1944 bond proposal estimated it would cost $682,000 to construct Matilija Dam; 20 years later, after cost overruns, lawsuits, fines and an emergency surgery to reduce the risk of catastrophic failure, an engineering journal estimated the total cost of the dam at $4 million.
Before its construction, Ventura architect Harold Burket predicted in testimony before the Ventura County Board of Supervisors that the planned use in construction of alkali aggregate from the Santa Clara River Valley would react badly with concrete in the dam. Twelve years after the reservoir was full, a safety inspection by Bechtel Corp. showed internal swelling, external cracking, disintegration of the wall and movement of the abutments. After the county’s insurance was canceled, county officials asked how much it would cost to remove the flawed edifice: $300,000 to $350,000, said Bechtel.
That was too much for the county at the time. But 36 years later, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal Interior Department, the county Flood Control District, the Friends of the Ventura River, the local chapter of the Surfrider Foundation and numerous others have allied in an attempt to bring down the dam and restore the river.
No one knows how much it will cost, but Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) sponsored a bill that designated $100,000 to research options for removal and, with little apparent opposition, the politically mixed Board of Supervisors has joined the effort.
This is plain common sense. After Matilija Dam was constructed, responsibility for maintenance and operation was turned over to the Casitas Water District on a long-term lease. That lease will expire this decade, returning responsibility to the county. Not only is Matilija Dam an enormous white elephant, it’s a white elephant soon to expire--in desperate need of a proper burial.
Last fall, Bruce Babbitt, then Interior secretary, flew out from Washington to ceremonially cut into the dam. This thin notch marks it as the nation’s largest dam yet to be slated for destruction--or, euphemistically, decommissioning.
“You are at ground zero of the dam decommissioning movement,” Jim Edmondson of California Trout told me. “The most enlightened, the most progressive--it’s really inspiring.”
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The reasons for removing the dam are primarily environmental. Take away Matilija Dam and it’s believed that eroding beaches will be replenished naturally with sand from upstream. What’s more, given half a chance the fish will return to the river and the creek.
Yet when Henke first addressed Supervisors on the subject in 1998, he didn’t begin by speaking of fish or sand. He spoke about the Ventura of the 1930s and ‘40s when he was growing up, a place where everyone from newly arrived Portuguese immigrants to the police chief would go down to the river to fish, to play and to see the steelhead run.
Henke says he knows that times have changed, but he wonders if life is better now, and he can’t help but connect the loss of the healthy river with a community that seems to lack a center. He misses the fish and he misses the rise and fall of the wild river, and he misses the country he found in the city that once was Ventura.
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CalTrout’s Edmondson links Ventura County’s willingness to restore the river to the anti-sprawl sentiments reflected in the passage of the Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources (SOAR) initiatives. Both show how much county residents care about their remaining natural surroundings.
SOAR activist and now Supervisor Steve Bennett argues that we are engaged in a grand experiment to see if we can do it differently than they do in Los Angeles.
That caring for the wilds was apparent on the rainy Sunday morning when the volunteer “stream team,” led by Ventura County Surfrider chapter Chairman Paul Jenkin, turned out to test the water. The effort was partially funded by the Bureau of Reclamation, with water testing equipment donated by the county. Still, someone had to wade out into the mud and cold water. On that first weekend, so many volunteers signed up to help that Jenkin feared he might have to think about crowd control.
Can we imagine a better future for Ventura County and its river? That is the question. If early support for removal of the dam and restoration of the river are any guide, we can.
Perhaps it’s this sort of country-in-the-city vision that distinguishes Ventura County from of its neighbors.
“Man is a part of nature,” wrote Rachel Carson, “and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.” Perhaps we have learned from our losses that we are better off at peace with our rivers and streams instead of trying to entomb them in concrete.
Supervisor Flynn, who like Henke grew up not far from Ventura Avenue, speaks wistfully of the wild river and the Avenue area before the freeway. He has no illusions that it will be easy to remove the dam but insists that “unless you have an ideal, some kind of a dream, you’re not going to get anywhere.”
I stand on the road, the green canyon behind me, and look out over the sparkling water and think how lovely Matilija Canyon must have been before the dam, especially in the spring.
What a lovely valley this will be again.
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da3f89c36a703e0c825b66a6df8b4e8b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-15-mn-51270-story.html | Emergency Dispatchers Cope With Their Own Distress | Emergency Dispatchers Cope With Their Own Distress
When she answered the phone Sept. 1, 1991, police dispatcher Desda Doersam heard a gunshot. The hysterical caller said she was hiding behind a coffee table and her son had just shot his wife.
“This is probably the worst call I had ever dealt with,” recalled Doersam, a 20-year veteran with the Miami Township police department. “All I could think of is: Is the woman OK? I actually heard the shot being fired.”
Doersam dispatched officers, then waited an agonizing three minutes before learning that the suspect had surrendered and her caller was safe. The caller’s daughter-in-law, however, lay dead, her boyfriend wounded.
Doersam said she went to her doctor later that day when she started feeling pain in her arms and feared she was having a heart attack.
“I just couldn’t deal with it very well,” she said. “I was stressing out.”
Shootings, drownings, even tornadoes are all in a day’s work for police and fire dispatchers, but the pressures do take a toll and affect how smoothly public safety institutions run.
In Salt Lake City, the turnover rate for dispatchers in 2000 was 31%, up from 19% the previous year, said Carol Groustra, bureau chief for the Utah Department of Public Safety. One reason, she said, is stress.
In Minneapolis, where about 600,000 emergency calls are handled each year, the 911 office is chronically understaffed because of a high turnover, forcing dispatchers to work overtime.
In Ohio, the State Highway Patrol has responded to an increasing workload by hiring more dispatchers--282 statewide, up from 242 in January 2000.
“Ultimately, this will be able to help reduce some of those stresses,” patrol spokesman Sgt. Gary Lewis said.
Lisa Filipucci, a dispatcher at the patrol’s Sandusky post, said she never knows what she will encounter when the telephone rings.
“You always have that anxiety. It is very stressful,” said Filipucci, a 20-year veteran. “I’m sure getting a few gray hairs.”
On Nov. 5, 1997, Filipucci took a cell phone call from a duck hunter on the shores of Sandusky Bay. The caller said his friend had gone into the water to retrieve their boat and had gone under. The hunter said he had tried to rescue him, but failed.
“He had no idea where he was. He didn’t know what to do,” Filipucci recalled. “He wanted to go back out into the water, but it was freezing. I had to work with him to try to get a location.”
Filipucci said she remained on the phone with the hunter for nearly an hour and couldn’t take her eyes off the clock.
“You’re concerned for his safety and hypothermia,” she said. “As the seconds went on, they seemed like minutes and hours to me.”
The hunter eventually was rescued. His friend drowned.
Filipucci said a dispatcher must struggle to remain composed when a caller is hysterical.
“If they sense you’re anxious or upset, they escalate,” she said. “If you can remain calm, a lot of times you can bring the people down and they think much clearer.”
Lewis said dispatchers serve as a lifeline for patrol officers. He said many dispatchers develop a sixth sense to recognize when an officer is in trouble.
“They [the dispatchers] will call for backup just [from] hearing the heightened tension in your voice,” he said. “They have to be very fine-tuned to what’s going on.”
Hal Brown, a Massachusetts-based psychotherapist and former police officer, writes for Police Stressline, a Web site designed to help police deal with the pressures of the job.
“The stress is incredible when you’re dispatching someone and they’re not getting there quick enough,” Brown said. “You’re on the radio, and you’re hearing gunshots. There’s got to be a tremendous feeling of helplessness.”
Brown’s advice in those situations: “Don’t hold the feelings in, but find somebody you can talk to. And then know when you need professional help. Don’t deny that you’re having symptoms.”
Sometimes dispatchers make crucial snap decisions.
Based on calls she was getting from residents, Xenia, Ohio, dispatch supervisor June Johnson activated tornado sirens Sept. 20 even though the National Weather Service had not issued a tornado warning. A twister touched down in the southwest Ohio city, injuring more than 100 people and causing an estimated $40 million in damage.
The city manager honored Johnson for her decisiveness.
“I’m sure her actions saved many lives. If she hadn’t gone ahead and taken the action on her own . . . residents would have had no warning whatsoever,” Assistant City Manager Charlie Leonard said.
According to a survey of 254 New Jersey dispatchers, a perceived lack of control is a major contributor to job stress and burnout.
Brown said lack of recognition also figures in.
“They’re the least seen and least glamorous part of the team, yet they need to be the crucial part,” he said.
Renee Meador, co-founder of a Virginia-based group designed to help officers and dispatchers, called dispatchers the “forgotten children” of the emergency response team, although they share the burdens of changing shifts and being on call around the clock.
“And you are talking about a job culture that has no margin of error thanks to a world of civil liability,” she said. “You don’t get a second chance.”
Dispatcher Doersam said calls can trigger a roller coaster of emotions. Emergencies like shootings sometimes come in on the nonemergency line, catching dispatchers by surprise.
“Then you get a 911 call--you get your adrenaline up and ready to go--and it’s somebody reporting a barking dog,” she said.
Doersam, 54, said she gravitated toward the job because her mother and several of her friends were dispatchers.
Dispatcher Filipucci, 39, had applied to nursing school when the dispatcher’s job opened at the Sandusky post. She took it and never looked back. She says she loves it because of the satisfaction of being able to help people.
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08a2e693e45c8740d85747c73a769d9e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-18-mn-52438-story.html | A Lake Shrinks From Drought and Disarray | A Lake Shrinks From Drought and Disarray
This state is in the grip of what may be its worst drought in recorded history. How dry is it? Parts of Lake Okeechobee, in normal years a vast reservoir for slaking the thirst of farms, industry and people, can now be set on fire.
At Pahokee, a farm town of 9,500 on the southeast shore of Lake Okeechobee, sailboats and motorboats lie on the sand or muck of the now exposed lake bed. The town, which draws its drinking water from the lake, had to lower the intake nozzle to avoid sucking in air and may not have dropped it enough.
“This is the worst drought in 100 years,” said Randy Smith, spokesman for the South Florida Water Management District, based in West Palm Beach. “Every eight to 10 years in Florida, a spell of drought, like clockwork, comes in. But I’ve never seen it this bad.”
An uncommonly long dry spell is certainly to blame. According to Ken Svoboda, a climate expert at the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Miami this year has received only 74% of its customary rainfall, Orlando and Jacksonville 61%.
Lake Okeechobee, the nation’s largest body of fresh water after the Great Lakes, has dropped to record lows. This week, the mean water level fell under 10 feet above sea level, more than 5 feet below where it was at this time last year.
However, there is little doubt nature has been assisted by man, a familiar enough story in a state where growth and development, like sorcerers’ apprentices, often usher in unforeseen consequences.
Last year, the water management district intentionally drained more than 100 billion gallons from Lake Okeechobee, which in normal times holds enough to meet four years of potable water demand for Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and the other cities on the southern Atlantic Coast.
Officials acted after five years of human-engineered high-water levels in the lake had been blamed for killing aquatic vegetation and ruining the habitat of a species of fish greatly popular with anglers, the large-mouth bass.
In pulling the plug at Okeechobee in April 2000, “the [water management] board took a chance,” said Tommy Strowd, the district’s director of operations.
With the rainfall drying up, the timing turned out to be lousy.
Okeechobee is the ultimate backup source for a complex water system that also includes subterranean aquifers and above-ground holding pools on the fringes of populated Southeast Florida. The lake is considered the “liquid heart” of the system.
So far, according to Strowd, the overall water situation in South Florida is serious but not critical. Rationing has not yet affected agriculture or industry.
Millions of homeowners in Florida’s center and south are under orders to water their lawns no more than twice a week or face fines. Restaurants on the lower Atlantic and Gulf coasts are supposed to give customers a glass of water on request only.
Moving to a more stringent level of rationing would cost the state at least $650 million, water officials say, with victims as varied as citrus groves, the landscape industry, golf courses and tourism.
“If the lake keeps going down, it could get hairy,” Pahokee City Manager Ken Schenck said.
The underground aquifers that provide water for the cities are near their normal levels, Strowd said. But if the lack of rain continues, water may have to be siphoned from Okeechobee to replenish those subterranean reservoirs.
“We may not see the lake recover to levels sufficient to get us through the next dry season,” Strowd said. “In that case, we’re looking at the very real possibility of a multiyear drought.”
Water managers in South Florida have the difficult, perhaps impossible chore of satisfying myriad public sectors, such as sugar cane growers, cattle ranchers and beachfront communities, whose needs often conflict.
Carroll Head, 63, a bass fisherman and president of the Friends of Lake Okeechobee, an activist group, believes officials maintained the lake at dangerously high levels in part to make sure there would be water to keep South Florida’s golf courses lushly green.
“We may be in a losing fight here. I admit it,” Head said. “There are a lot more golfers than bass fishermen.”
Nowhere are the effects of the drought more obvious than on Okeechobee and the namesake town of 48,000 on its north shore. The lake, which normally sprawls to drown the equivalent of 500,000 football fields, is shrinking.
A mile from the earthen dam that rings the lake, the water may be only 2 feet deep, a third of its customary depth. Near the mouth of the Kissimmee River, the shoreline has receded by 150 feet and more. Bullrushes are normally drenched in water but now tremble naked in the breeze as buzzards stalk on sand bars left by the vanishing waters.
Taking advantage of the receding waterline, officials last year began setting fires in the dry lake bed to destroy 20,000 acres of torpedo grass and other invading plants not native to Florida. Wildfires set by arsonists, most recently this March, have consumed an additional 53,000 acres.
“The little town’s going to suffer this summer. I mean, suffer bad,” said Harvey Ford, 68, who last week canceled two bass fishing tournaments due to the low water level. “There’s going to be some businesses fold. Little mom-and-pop places. They can’t take it.”
Greg and Karen MacLean, who bought a fishing tackle shop in November, say the demand for fishing guides is way off. “The next two months are normally busy and booked way in advance, but we’ve got 50% open dates,” Greg MacLean said.
Karen MacLean apologizes in advance, but says she prays for a hurricane later this year to bring plenty of rain.
Wildlife has also been affected. Airboat captains on Lake Okeechobee report seeing young dead alligators that starved because marshes where they normally lie in ambush for wading birds are now high and dry. In Highlands County, northwest of the lake, one resident said a 12-foot bull gator, thirsty and famished, recently ate his neighbor’s cat, then clamped his jaws around the bumper of a truck.
In large part to stop the environmental havoc caused by stockpiling water in the lake, Florida officials have come up with a controversial plan to store billions of gallons of untreated rainwater in the ground instead.
David Struhs, secretary of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, says the plan is to pump the water 800 feet down into a layer of limestone. It could then be retrieved, treated to existing federal drinking-water standards and used to keep Everglades National Park and the other marshlands south of Lake Okeechobee wet.
This water wouldn’t be used for supplying municipalities, Struhs said in an interview, but would indirectly help by keeping the pressure up in underwater aquifers. That would keep seawater from intruding and polluting the water sources of coastal towns.
The Environmental Protection Agency, which normally requires that water pumped into the ground be treated beforehand, hasn’t given formal approval to Florida’s plan.
Some critics call the proposal, which preceded the drought, a threat to health and the environment. Struhs says there is no risk for humans--and that it’s much better for Lake Okeechobee.
“We’re trying to restore the lake and use it less over time like a reservoir and more like a lake,” Struhs said.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Drought’s Scope
Lake Okeechobee is the heart of South Florida’s water supply. One official calls the current drought the worst in 100 years.
Source: NOAA
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b9b4ca5df8c74a70f6320c83030055db | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-19-ca-52716-story.html | Well, Listen to a Story | Well, Listen to a Story
She’s a beautiful, quick-tempered Hollywood stagehand who socks a superstar in the mouth when his hand caresses her “tempting bottom.” The superstar loses a tooth. She loses her job. And, after a blow-out with her old-school father, she heads for parts unknown in her Jeep.
He’s a tall, lean and hard-muscled Marlboro Man with “chiseled, bronze features,” who falls head-over-bootheels in love with this independent-minded stranger from Hollywood whose Jeep breaks down next to his Montana ranch.
Throw in greed, corruption, personal values and a little sex and you’ve got “Kelly’s Quest,” a love story by an unlikely first-time novelist: Buddy Ebsen.
The star of “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Barnaby Jones” just turned 93. While Ebsen is a late bloomer as a novelist, he’s no newcomer to writing. During nearly 70 years in show business, the hoofer-turned-actor wrote five plays that were produced.. The title of his 1994 autobiography, “The Other Side of Oz” (Donovan), refers to his most unusual claim to fame: He was the original Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz,” until he nearly died from inhaling the aluminum dust in his makeup and was replaced by Jack Haley.
Ebsen is also a painter, whose most recent work includes a series of humorous, folk-art-style paintings that portray Jed Clampett with his old hound dog, Duke.
Ebsen underwent a heart-valve replacement three years ago, but since then has been in fine fettle. Good-humored and gentlemanly, he even did a shim sham shimmy, the traditional on-stage greeting of two hoofers--a tap step followed by outspread arms and a shimmy--after having his picture taken.
Seated in the sun room off the kitchen in his Palos Verdes Estates home with Dorothy, his German-born wife of 18 years, Ebsen discussed his latest creative endeavor, which he wrote “the old-fashioned way: with a yellow pad and a pen.”
Question: What prompted you to write a novel?
Answer: I was working on “Barnaby Jones"and I walked on the set one morning and there was the usual crew--male, except one person: It was a female and, of course, she caught my eye, because she was very, very attractive. I was fascinated. She was doing the work well and the thing is the guys that she worked with treated her just like one of the fellas. I couldn’t forget her. I thought, what kind of a life did she come from? And what is her life? And why is she doing this when a girl as good-looking as she is could be an actress? And that was the root of my [novel].
Q: So, you carried that idea around for nearly 20 years?
A: Yeah. I didn’t really think of writing a novel until I read “The Bridges of Madison County” and I thought, “Gee, I can write a novel.” So I started and the rewriting is the tough part. I would get up at 4 in the morning and work until daylight every day in order to get anywhere.
Q: Was it easy or difficult to write a main character who is a woman?
A: Dorothy tells me that I prefer to write about women. [He laughs.] Is that true?
Dorothy Ebsen: Buddy wrote quite a few plays about women--[evangelist] Aimee Semple McPherson and Mary, Queen of Scots. Buddy seems to lean toward women, and it’s amazing how he understands them.
Buddy Ebsen: I had four sisters [including dancing partner, Vilma] and I seem to see the world sometimes through their points of view and I look to them, so I suppose that had something to do with it.
Q: How did you feel about writing the brief love scene between Kelly and her Montana boyfriend?
A: I just thought that would be interesting and entertaining for people and also it would fit in to the character when she finally has a love scene with the Mr. Right that she finds. I think it’s a very effective, real emotional portrayal. It happens right after he’s defended her in a fight, so it’s very pure and pure love.
Q: The thought of Buddy Ebsen writing a love story may seem out of character to many.
A: There are a lot of me’s. Before I came to Hollywood, I was a sophisticated dancer in hot supper clubs in New York with my sister. I wore tails and a high hat. I wasn’t just the hillbilly I portrayed.
Q: Did the phenomenal success of “The Beverly Hillbillies” come as a surprise?
A: Not completely because when I was given a copy of the script, the very first one, I read it and I started to laugh and I laughed all the way through it. That was when I felt that, you know, when you get your chance to get up to bat and they throw it and you swing and pray. This is one that put me in that position, and I was right. It was funny, and it is funny today.
Q: What do you like about writing?
A: Dorothy doesn’t like the way I describe it, but you take a blank piece of paper and whatever you’re thinking, you write it down. I’m very satisfied if, in my mind, it increased the value of the paper. [He grins.] That’s what writing should do. It should increase the value of the paper. If I do that, I feel high.
Q: Do you plan to write another novel?
A: I’m writing one about Barnaby Jones, actually--an adventure he had, and I’ve got all the notes for it and I’ve got the synopsis written. That would probably be the next one, although I’m toying with two other novel ideas. My mind is bubbling with this stuff and I don’t have time to do it all.
* Buddy Ebsen will sign “Kelly’s Quest” at 3 p.m. Saturday at Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont Ave., L.A. (in Los Feliz). (323) 660-1175. “Kelly’s Quest” is available in bookstores on the Web at 1stBooks.com and BuddyEbsen.com.
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679505bb1f473d41d37844c38c82a9e8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-22-sp-54266-story.html | Trade of No. 1 Helps Chargers Land Two Aces | Trade of No. 1 Helps Chargers Land Two Aces
A day after the San Diego Chargers took a gamble they might hear about for years, luck was with them at least for a day Saturday.
The Chargers watched the Atlanta Falcons make quarterback Michael Vick the No. 1 pick of the NFL draft with the choice they traded away, then came away with two players they coveted: running back LaDainian Tomlinson of Texas Christian and, in a mild surprise, quarterback Drew Brees of Purdue, who takes Vick’s place as quarterback of the future after being selected with the first pick of the second round.
The Chargers got Tomlinson, considered a threat to go as high as third, with the fifth pick, which they received from Atlanta along with the Falcons’ third-round pick this year, second-round pick next year and receiver Tim Dwight.
“As soon as we made the trade, this was the guy we wanted to get,” Coach Mike Riley said.
The Arizona Cardinals used the second pick to take Leonard Davis, a nearly 6-foot-6, 370-pound offensive tackle from Texas, before the Cleveland Browns and Cincinnati Bengals followed by taking two of the remarkable nine defensive linemen chosen in the first round.
Then came Tomlinson, a player destined to be remembered as part of the trade that sent Vick to Atlanta.
“I don’t feel any added pressure,” said Tomlinson, who ran for 2,158 yards last season and joins a Charger team that ran for a league-low 1,062 during a 1-15 season.
“I know what it takes to rebuild a team,” Tomlinson said. “My freshman year, we were 1-10.”
The more unexpected development was Brees--third in the Heisman Trophy balloting, just ahead of Tomlinson. Brees fell to the Chargers with the 32nd pick partly because of questions about his 5-foot-11 frame.
“I didn’t think he was going to be there,” Charger General Manager John Butler said. “I really thought he was a first-round talent.”
As the Chargers’ turn approached with Brees still on the board, Butler made a call to try to move up and select Brees. No luck.
But when the Oakland Raiders and Miami Dolphins, teams in need of quarterback prospects, both passed, the Chargers had their man.
He’ll cost a lot less than Vick and, after four seasons at Purdue, is considered more game-ready than Vick, who played only two at Virginia Tech.
“I think you make a big mistake if you compare Michael Vick and Drew Brees,” Charger offensive coordinator Norv Turner said. “Michael Vick is the first pick in the draft, and Drew Brees is the first player taken in the second round.
“I think everyone knows what Michael Vick is capable of and where he can go as a player.”
Brees might help the Chargers sooner, though he is expected to do little more than compete for the backup spot behind Doug Flutie this season.
Riley pointed out that Brees had attempted more than 1,500 passes at Purdue and called him the most ready to play of any quarterback in the draft.
This year’s draft was billed as a receivers’ draft, but it quickly proved to be heavy on defensive linemen.
Gerard Warren went third to the Browns and Justin Smith of Missouri went fourth, to the Bengals.
Four of the first seven players taken were defensive linemen, among them Cal’s Andre Carter, the son of New York Jet assistant and former NFL player Rubin Carter.
Carter went seventh to the San Francisco 49ers, who moved up two spots in a trade with the Seattle Seahawks.
Seven defensive linemen were among the top 13 picks, with two others going later in the first round.
Six receivers were taken in the first round, well short of the projections of nine by some pundits.
The first receiver drafted was David Terrell of Michigan, taken eighth by the Chicago Bears, followed by Koren Robinson of North Carolina State, picked ninth by the Seahawks.
Some NFL decision-makers might have been influenced by watching the Baltimore Ravens win the Super Bowl with two huge run-stopping tackles in Sam Adams and Tony Siragusa.
“You are hearing people discuss having big guys on the inside,” said James Harris, the Ravens’ director of pro personnel. “When teams win the Super Bowl and have success, generally other teams tend to want to utilize the same idea.”
Perhaps even more important was a bit of draft wisdom. Draft a receiver in the first round at your own peril.
Green Bay Packer General Manager Ron Wolf, who presided over his final draft Saturday, never has.
Dan Reeves, Atlanta’s coach and vice president of football operations, traded up for Vick when many expected him to take a receiver at No. 5.
“You look at the history of receivers who have come out and not made a huge impact,” Reeves said. “My philosophy has always been, there are always people there who can help you at wide receiver.”
As NFL.com draft analyst Gil Brandt, a former Dallas Cowboy general manager, put it: “You don’t usually get defensive linemen in the fourth or fifth round. I think you can get wide receivers who will play well for you in the fourth or fifth round, or as free agents.”
Defense was the word on Day One of the draft, which continues today with the final four rounds.
In the first round, 21 of the 31 picks were defensive players.
The St. Louis Rams, trying to refurbish their defense after their spectacular swoon last season after winning the Super Bowl the season before, took three of them: No. 12 Damione Lewis, a defensive tackle from Miami; No. 20 Adam Archuleta from Arizona State, who will play safety; and No. 29 Ryan Pickett of Ohio State, a defensive tackle.
The Rams also added free-agent cornerback Aeneas Williams in a sign-and-trade deal with the Cardinals before the draft.
The Rams and Chargers probably had the best day of any teams, the Rams because of sheer volume and the Chargers because of disaster averted.
The one need the Chargers didn’t fill in the first three rounds was for an offensive lineman to block for Tomlinson as he tries to improve a running game that averaged only 66 yards a game.
The Chargers used the third-round pick they received from Atlanta--they didn’t have one of their own--on Tay Cody of Florida State, a big-play cornerback expected to contribute as a nickel back right away.
“You take a look at Florida State, Purdue with Brees, and LaDainian almost helped turn around the program at TCU alone,” Butler said. “We’re looking for winners.”
After a 1-15 season, the draft might be the place to find them.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
TOP PICKS
*--*
1. Atlanta Michael Vick QB 2. Arizona Leonard Davis T 3. Cleveland Gerard Warren DT 4. Cincinnati Justin Smith DE 5. San Diego LaDainian Tomlinson RB
*--*
* ROUND ONE AT GLANCE: D10
* ROUNDS TWO, THREE: D11
* MIKE PENNER, SOUND & VISION: D11
JOINS EAGLES: Philadelphia uses 25th pick in first round to select UCLA wide receiver Freddie Mitchell, who left college after junior season. D10
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36600c8caf5ae94aab50b36d41180720 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-26-cl-55632-story.html | A Silk Purse Out of a Sow’s Ear | A Silk Purse Out of a Sow’s Ear
A candy counter ran down one side, a soda fountain down the other, and there was a blue room in the back serving lunch and dinner. An organ in the front room played while people were dining. “Dad’s restaurant was such a fine, elegant restaurant,” Lois Weber, now 81, recalls of the Pig ‘n Whistle on Hollywood Boulevard, the regular haunt of the likes of Shirley Temple, Spencer Tracy and Howard Hughes that her father ran in the late 1930s and ‘40s.
Today, the main dining room is up front, and booths and tables sporting fine linens and flatware have taken the place of the former candy counter. The blue room at the back has become a second dining area, but in addition to tables and chairs, it now sports several queen-size beds, following a current club trend, for diners to enjoy as well.
The Pig ‘n Whistle reopened in its landmark site last month after a renovation that approached $2 million. Once a family-friendly hot spot, today it symbolizes an updated vision for Hollywood Boulevard, reviving the vintage look for a young, hip clientele.
The restaurant’s new incarnation is the work of business partners Chris Breed and Allan Hajjar, best known for their high-end Hollywood nightclub, the Sunset Room. Two years ago, they were approached about restoring the Pig ‘n Whistle, located next to the Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. The venue was clearly a Cinderella--it had become a ramshackle fast-food joint, in keeping with the decay of the surrounding neighborhood, but beneath the grit and the faux ceiling and walls remained the framework of the once-ornate family restaurant.
Hajjar, a structural engineer by training, knew that the project would be daunting, but he and Breed were attracted to playing a part in reviving Old Hollywood.
“I used to see Hollywood as a glamorous place, but when I got here, I realized how rundown it had gotten,” says Breed, who grew up and began his career as a restaurateur in England. “My father was into the movies, so it’s a little bit of a tribute to him, to bring back old Hollywood to its glory days.”
It also seemed like a good business opportunity, given the renovation of the Egyptian Theatre into the new home of the American-Cinematheque in 1998, and the nearby development at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue.
The job was a major challenge, Hajjar says, and at 3,500 square feet took two years to accomplish. The elaborate coffered ceiling, cornices and wall brackets took the most time, and money; although original details remained after the drop ceiling and wallboard were removed, much was damaged. Silicone molds had to be made to reproduce the missing sections in fiberglass multiples. Old photographs guided the reconstruction.
Of course, there were also various permits to be obtained--the building’s facade is a historical landmark, so any work on it required approval. These weren’t very difficult to get, since Breed and Hajjar were for the most part recreating the original Pig ‘n Whistle look. The overhanging marquee was still there, for example, although the original words and decorations had been boarded over. Now, the new neon around the marquee is an exact replica of the original. The original Pig ‘n Whistle opened July 22, 1927, designed by the team of Morgan, Walls & Clements, who were also responsible for the El Capitan and Wiltern Theatres. The restaurant was one of a now-defunct national chain.
With its heavy wooden detailing, including paneling, booths, and a Gothic-style coffered ceiling, Breed believes some decorations of his Pig ‘n Whistle date from an even earlier incarnation of the building, around 1910, a period of Gothic revival.
The name derives from two Old English words: “piggin,” a lead mug, and “wassail,” a mulled wine drunk at yuletide. The original dancing pig logo appears throughout the restaurant--today as it did in the heyday-- featured prominently on a front panel over the entry and as the centerpiece of 1920s tiles throughout the premises.
The Hollywood Pig ‘n Whistle folded in the 1950s, and its contents were sold off--the old wooden booths can be found now just around the corner at Micelli’s Italian restaurant. Today’s version offers an upscale California menu, but Breed has insisted on including a touch of traditional pub fare, such as his mother’s recipe for shepherd’s pie. There is a kids’ menu, but late in the evening the restaurant turns down the lights and is definitely meant to appeal to a nightclub crowd.
Despite these changes, Weber believes that the renovated Pig ‘n Whistle brings her memories back to life. “I’m just so lucky to see all this come around,” she says.
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ab364eb0ab17dd0712ecb3845bdfff2d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-28-mn-56638-story.html | For Bush, All Roads Lead to Crawford | For Bush, All Roads Lead to Crawford
During his eight years as president, Ronald Reagan spent approximately one year in California, much of that time at his ranch near Santa Barbara. George W. Bush is on pace to beat that record--by a country mile.
During the first 100 days of his presidency, Bush will have spent all or part of 16 days at his 1,580-acre Prairie Chapel Ranch by the time his current four-day sojourn ends today.
That projects to 467 days over an eight-year stretch, or 233 days, give or take a few hours, should he serve one term.
As much as Bush may echo Reagan in policy and pace, however, Crawford isn’t Santa Barbara. Nor is it Martha’s Vineyard, Bill Clinton’s preferred vacation spot. Nor even Kennebunkport, Maine, where the first President Bush went for what he called “re-creation.”
It isn’t coastal. It isn’t chi-chi quaint. But in the mild spring, it is green, and it is friendly.
All that seems just fine with this president from West Texas.
What should we make of these presidential retreats? Let the president explain it himself, as he did Wednesday evening at a Republican fund-raising dinner in Little Rock, Ark., on his way to the ranch.
“I’m headed to Crawford, Texas, after this speech. They say, well, you must not like to live in Washington because you like to go to your ranch or Camp David. Well, I like to do both. I like--I love my life in the White House, I love getting up every morning and going into this majestic office that we call the Oval Office.
“But I also like to stay in touch with the people that got me here.”
That’s where the ranch comes in.
He continued:
“I like to get outside of Washington. I like to go to where the space is open, where I can walk around with Spot and Barney, the two family dogs. My wife loves our country, the country house we’ve got, and so do I, and so I beg your forgiveness for not eating dinner here tonight. . . . I’m fixing to get on Air Force One and take it to Crawford, Texas.”
The ranch is about seven miles from the center of Crawford. That would be an intersection where a flashing red light is sufficient to keep control at the town’s main junction. The nearest full-blown traffic light is perhaps another seven miles away.
Crawford has an elementary school, a former gas station now grown large--it was recently converted into a corner restaurant and gas station and named the Coffee Station.
It’s not difficult to reach Crawford from Waco, the largest nearby town, about 25 miles away. Just drive south on Interstate 35, northwest on Texas 6 and then southwest on Highway 185.
But to stray from the route brings new directions, twists through the Texas countryside, and, in either case this time of year, a path through acres of wildflowers that give the pastures the down-home hue of embers glowing at the base of a barbecue kettle.
“Go past the grocery store. Turn left onto Old Lorena Road, left on U.S. 84, go to the stoplight. That’s McGregor. Turn right. That’ll carry you into Crawford,” says an elderly man at a conveniently placed Chevron Food Mart.
Perhaps, but it also carries one down an unmarked, potholed route, past such delightfully Texas-named roads as Mourning Dove Lane and Longhorn Drive and, back on track, past what appears to be the place that carnival rides go when they take long vacations. That would be the intersection of Galaxy and Cedar Rock roads.
Eventually, with the proper turns, all roads lead to Crawford. It really is near the heart of Texas.
The president did peel away from the ranch on two occasions--first on Thursday to make an appearance at an annual fund-raising affair his mother sponsored in Houston to benefit her literacy project and a second time, on Friday, to take part in the dedication of the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin.
Bush uses the visits home to spend time with his parents.
During the only dark days of George W. Bush’s primary election campaign, in New Hampshire early last year, his father’s vigorous defense of his candidacy verged on becoming a liability. Ever since, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush have kept a public distance, lest the business of running the country looked too much like a family business.
To be sure, the president known around the White House as 41 and his son known as 43 (as in the 41st and 43rd presidents, respectively), have kept up an almost daily, and entirely private, dialogue. They have visited at the ranch and at the White House.
But Thursday in Houston, the two presidents, Barbara Bush (wife of one, mother of the other) and current First Lady Laura Bush joined one another on stage at the Wortham Center to celebrate literacy--one of Barbara Bush’s projects as first lady and a continuing interest.
Each year the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy’s Celebration of Reading brings several authors to Houston to read from their works. Thursday’s program, the former first lady said, raised $2 million to be split equally between literacy projects in Texas and in the rest of the country.
So there was the retired president, shifting from leg to leg, his hands shoved deep into his trouser pockets in his “aw-shucks” manner as the program got underway, two presidents, two first ladies, all named Bush, on the stage.
“I’m the president--and you’re not,” the younger Bush ribbed his father. He suggested that he could avoid the fund-raising challenge that goes with building a presidential library if the words “and son” would just be added to the George H. W. Bush presidential library in College Station, Texas.
The family kidding aside, he said he bore “the proudest title ever been given to me: son of Barbara and George Bush.”
Then the authors’ program began.
A reading by Elizabeth George, rife with references to a vibrator and orgasm, left the audience laughing--albeit nervously.
British mystery ace P. D. James and former British Prime Minister John Major delivered high-minded, literate and human accounts.
And what did President 43 do?
Bush-fils chose readings from his own oeuvres, echoing a speech he had given to a dinner of radio and television correspondents in Washington several weeks ago. It was a collection of what have come to be known as “Bushisms"--his own contributions to the English language.
“I actually said this,” he began. Then he read:
“I know that human beings and fish can coexist peacefully.”
“I understand small business growth. I was one.”
“More and more of our imports come from overseas.”
“Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?”
(This last one, he analyzed: If you’re a stickler, you probably think the singular verb ‘is’ should have been the plural ‘are.’ But if you read it closely, you’ll see that I’m using the intransitive plural subjective tense. And so the word ‘is’ are correct.”)
When it was over, his father joined him on the stage. He pointed an index finger at his son, and the quiet gesture said, “You did OK.”
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71b172e609f17e3ac9c8cba546441362 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-29-sp-57307-story.html | Loss Is a Test of Strength for Teresa Earnhardt | Loss Is a Test of Strength for Teresa Earnhardt
Instead of 50 candles, there is a single flame.
Instead of a birthday celebration for Dale Earnhardt today at the NAPA Auto Parts 500, there is a solitary woman in mourning 3,000 miles away.
Teresa Earnhardt rode shotgun with Dale for 22 years. She was his partner, in love and in business.
His equal. His flame.
They were apart only during Dale’s occasional hunting or fishing excursions and those fleeting, fabulous, frightening hours he spent behind the wheel of his black No. 3 Chevrolet.
When Dale died Feb. 18 in a crash on the last lap of the Daytona 500, Teresa watched in horror, along with her parents and 12-year-old daughter, Taylor.
NASCAR lost an icon, an unparalleled driver with seven Winston Cup championships, a money magnet worth an estimated $400 million.
His family lost a husband, a father, a grandfather, a son, a brother, an in-law. The void Dale left is enormous, yet Teresa tries mightily to fill it with light.
“Teresa has been the strength of everybody,” said her father, Hal Houston. “This has to be the most difficult time of her life, but she is doing well. She is helping everyone else with this.”
When Randy Owens of the country group Alabama choked up as he prepared to sing at Dale’s funeral, Teresa whispered to him to think of something funny Dale had done.
When fans held vigils outside Dale Earnhardt Inc. at Mooresville, N.C., and sent bushels of sympathy cards, e-mails and gifts, Teresa wrote a letter of gratitude published in a national newspaper six days after Dale’s death. The letter ended, “He was the happiest person I know, and that can comfort us all.”
When DEI driver Steve Park won the Dura Lube 400 a week after Dale’s death, Teresa called to congratulate him.
“She sounded emotional, but it was an emotion of happiness,” Park said. “It meant a lot to me. Teresa has been incredibly strong.”
When news organizations pressured Teresa to authorize the release of Dale’s autopsy photos, she appeared at a March 4 news conference and delivered a sharply worded statement: “Honestly, I’m not very comfortable being here. It’s too soon. But this issue is of vital importance--not just to my family--but to anyone ever faced with being exploited after losing a loved one.”
She eventually reached a compromise with the Orlando Sentinel and other Tribune Co. papers, among them The Times, that allowed a medical expert to study the photos. As anyone who conducted business with DEI over the years can attest, Teresa is a pragmatic negotiator blessed with uncommon common sense.
“She was always the one who looked at the contracts--and nothing gets by her,” said Betty Houston, Teresa’s mother. “Souvenirs, merchandising, property, all the contracts had to be OKd by her.”
Teresa, 42, was a high achiever early on. She graduated from Bunker Hill High near Rockingham, N.C., in three years, earned a real estate license and attended an interior design school before meeting Dale in 1978, when she was 20.
Racing was in the family. Hal, a furniture wholesaler by trade, owned race cars. His brother, Tommy Houston, was a top driver who ranks third on the Busch Series all-time victory list. Tommy’s sons are in the business: Andy is a Winston Cup driver, Marty competes in the Busch Series and Scott is a Winston Cup crew chief.
So no one objected when Teresa fell for Dale, a twice-divorced ninth-grade dropout struggling to drive his way from backwoods dirt tracks into the big time. They met at a race in Martinsville, Va., where Dale drove one of Hal’s cars. By the time the racing circuit reached Hickory, N.C., a romance had blossomed.
“There was never a doubt in my mind that he was devoted to her,” Hal said. “I hunted and fished with him a lot before they got married. He was going to take care of her and vice versa.”
Dale passed muster with Tommy too.
“Dale and I talked about it when he and Teresa were dating,” Tommy said. “She was what he lived for. She was everything he wanted in a mate, in a wife. And she was the same way he was.”
Focused. Ambitious. Unwilling to let anything get in the way of victory.
For Dale it meant forging a reputation as a fearless--and feared--driver who would as soon bump a car as pass it cleanly.
For Teresa it meant learning everything possible about finances, tax laws and merchandise-licensing rights. When a lawyer or businessman handed the Earnhardts a contract, she had every obscure word and unintelligible phrase written in plain English. Once the document was to her satisfaction, she used it as a template in future deals.
While Dale became “the Intimidator,” behind the wheel, Teresa became “the Enforcer” behind the desk. While Dale was chief executive officer at DEI, Teresa was chairman.
The result is a financial empire unsurpassed in auto racing and approaching the range of Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan. Dale earned $41 million racing and 10 times that off the track. His T-shirt sales alone are reported at $40 million a year. Forbes estimated his 1999 earnings at $26.5 million.
DEI owns a fleet of aircraft, including a Learjet; a farm with 32,000 chickens and 400 head of Black Angus cattle, a Chevrolet dealership, thousands of acres of property and seats on the New York and American stock exchanges. Dale’s sponsors included Coca-Cola, Oreo, Burger King, Bass Pro shops, Snap-On tools and Gargoyles sunglasses. A recent acquisition is a minor league baseball team in Dale’s North Carolina hometown named the Kannapolis Intimidators.
And, of course, DEI is race-driven, owning the three-driver Winston Cup team of Park, Michael Waltrip and 26-year-old Dale Earnhardt Jr., whose mother, Brenda Jackson, was Dale’s second wife. Dale himself drove for a team owned by his friend Richard Childress, which maintains close ties with DEI.
The company’s crown jewel is a 200,000-square-foot concrete and glass headquarters in Mooresville dubbed the garage-Mahal. The portion open to the public has a 30-foot gold-painted ceiling, black marble floors and gave Teresa a chance to put that year of interior decorating school to use.
But her business prowess is the envy of any MBA. She secured control of Dale’s licensing and images 15 years ago and today one-third of NASCAR souvenirs are Earnhardt-related. She approved every trading card of her husband and copyrighted Dale’s signature, the “Intimidator” nickname and the No. 3 emblem.
And she nixed proposals that didn’t fit her marketing vision, such as Dale Earnhardt bikinis and halter tops.
There was no question that Dale, the DEI deity, was in charge. But in a racing culture where the man is behind the wheel and his wife doesn’t dare tell him how to drive, Teresa often pointed the way.
“She can grasp things easier than most people and that’s something Dale found out as they went through the years,” Tommy Houston said. “He’d tell me, ‘Hey, let’s let her decide.’
“At the same time, Dale recognized talent and put the right people in the cars and in the garage.”
Dale and Teresa had a few close advisors, including Childress, DEI General Manager Ty Norris and Don Hawk, the company president from 1992-2000.
“Teresa is going to run it and run it well,” said Hawk, who no longer is associated with DEI. “They were a great team together for the business and now she’s going to have to take on even more. But she can handle it, without a doubt.”
Norris, 36, is DEI’s visible leader in the garage and the pits. He is tireless and charismatic, but he reports to Teresa.
Dale Jr. and Dale’s two older children, Kerry, 31, and Kelley, 28, eventually might join the management team. The free-spirited Dale Jr., for one, is fine with his step-mom running the show.
“She is the cornerstone of the operation,” he said. “We’re going to continue the racing program and stick beside Teresa as best we can and help her any way she needs.”
Business aside, she might need help more than she lets on. Managing the 240 or so DEI employees is easier than coming to terms with her husband’s death. Teresa commented during her fight to seal the autopsy photos that she hadn’t had time to unpack the clothes Dale wore when he died.
Perhaps part of her didn’t really want to find the time.
Teresa’s parents hope she doesn’t isolate herself behind the guarded gates of the company compound. Her loved ones rely on her fire, but she needn’t forget they provide warmth as well.
“She don’t answer the phone,” Hal Houston said. “I call her office and her secretary has her call me back. I haven’t talked to her in two weeks.”
Teresa is declining interviews. A DEI spokeswoman said, “It’s just a bit early for that.”
Today is especially difficult. Dale would have been 50. The racing community continues to mourn his death. Dale considered NASCAR Chairman Bill France Jr. a father figure and was a close friend of President Mike Helton and other officials. Speculation that Teresa might hit NASCAR with a wrongful-death suit is probably off the mark.
She realizes her husband understood the perils of racing. And in her letter to fans, Teresa made clear her guiding principle: “I will ask myself in the coming days and weeks and for a long time after that, I’m sure, ‘What would Dale do?’ ”
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4e5b616fd1d8536c40f4c5c629840979 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-aug-02-fi-29723-story.html | Pepsi Gets to Buy Quaker | Pepsi Gets to Buy Quaker
PepsiCo Inc. got the green light Wednesday to buy Quaker Oats Co. and its top-selling Gatorade brand for about $14 billion after the Federal Trade Commission deadlocked over whether the new company would harm competition in the sports drink market.
FTC commissioners voted 2 to 2 on going to court to block Pepsi’s purchase, one vote short of the majority needed to file suit. A unanimous decision was then taken to close the investigation of the deal, an agency statement said.
Shares of Quaker Oats, after being halted for the FTC announcement, shot up 14%, or $12.30, to close at $100.30 on the New York Stock Exchange. PepsiCo, the No. 2 soft drink maker, fell $2.94, or 6.3%, to close at $43.69.
Quaker’s Gatorade, with a 78% share of U.S. sports drink volume last year, would increase PepsiCo’s U.S. drink sales by almost 10% and aid its battle against No. 1 beverage maker Coca-Cola Co., analysts have said.
Coca-Cola’s Powerade line commands 15% of the sports drink market and Pepsi’s existing All Sport brand has 4.4%, according to industry newsletter Beverage Digest.
To blunt competition concerns, Pepsi said May 1 it would sell the All Sport brand to Monarch Co., the Atlanta-based maker of Dad’s Root Beer.
Despite that concession, FTC staff lawyers feared competition from All Sport would evaporate if the brand was cut loose from Pepsi’s distribution system and recommended that agency commissioners block Pepsi’s purchase of Quaker Oats.
The FTC’s new chairman, Bush appointee Timothy Muris, recused himself from the vote because of a conflict of interest.
The remaining four commissioners split along party lines.
Democrats Sheila Anthony and Mozelle Thompson voted to block the deal, while Republicans Orson Swindle and Thomas Leary said there was insufficient evidence of adverse competitive effects to take to court.
“Allowing PepsiCo to further consolidate its soft drink position by acquiring Quaker Oats and its popular Gatorade products raises obvious and significant concerns that competition will be lost in the highly concentrated soft drink industry,” Anthony and Thompson said in a statement.
But Swindle and Leary said the FTC should monitor the industry carefully and “seek appropriate relief against any firms engaged in anti-competitive conduct, including, if necessary, post-acquisition divestitures.”
PepsiCo, the maker of Pepsi soft drinks, Frito-Lay snacks and Tropicana juices, said after the FTC decision that it would not distribute Gatorade in its bottling system for 10 years as part of the agreement to sell All Sport to Monarch.
But PepsiCo will be able to use Gatorade’s broker warehouse distribution system, which has helped Gatorade become so successful, PepsiCo spokesman Richard Detwiler said. “We think Gatorade has lots of growth opportunities,” he said.
Marc Cohen, beverage industry analyst at Goldman Sachs, said PepsiCo had given up the opportunity to sell Gatorade in soft drink vending machines. Goldman Sachs has estimated vending machines could have added about $100 million a year to Gatorade sales and would have minimal impact on PepsiCo earnings.
Caroline Levy, beverage industry analyst at UBS Warburg, said the Gatorade distribution system could benefit PepsiCo’s Tropicana orange juice business.
“The large part of why they did the deal is they can take Tropicana through Gatorade’s distribution system and accelerate Tropicana’s worth,” Levy said.
PepsiCo expects to close the Quaker Oats deal in the next several business days and complete the All Sport sale Wednesday.
Purchase, N.Y.-based PepsiCo and Quaker Oats announced their deal Dec. 4 last year.
Chicago-based Quaker, whose food products include hot and cold cereals such as oatmeal and Cap’n Crunch, Rice-A-Roni side dishes, and Aunt Jemima pancake mix, had been the subject of merger rumors for years.
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5aa22ca08f0496b8ca61e29e45087276 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-aug-02-me-29879-story.html | ‘Deacon’ Dan Towler; Rams’ Star Gave Up Football for Ministry | ‘Deacon’ Dan Towler; Rams’ Star Gave Up Football for Ministry
“Deacon” Dan Towler, a famed Los Angeles Rams running back of the early 1950s who abruptly ended his football career to become a Methodist minister, died in his sleep early Wednesday. He was 73.
In apparent good health and active, Towler had attended the Dodger game Tuesday night against the Cincinnati Reds before returning to his Pasadena home.
He was retired from the campus ministry at Cal State Los Angeles and was a six-term president of the Los Angeles County Board of Education, on which he served for 26 years. He also headed the Dan Towler Education Foundation, which helps needy students.
Towler also directed both the National School Boards Assn. and the California School Boards Assn. In 1987, he was appointed to the Child Abuse Task Force of the California Senate.
Towler first made a name in the Southland as a major figure on the great Rams teams in their early years in Los Angeles.
The 1951 Rams won their only world title in Los Angeles, with a team replete with stars up and down the lineup.
Tom Fears and Elroy Hirsch were two of the best receivers in the NFL and Bob Waterfield and Norm Van Brocklin were the quarterbacks. And the “Bull Elephant” backfield was made up of Towler, Tank Younger and Dick Hoerner--all 225-pound-plus runners who created fearsome collisions with would-be tacklers.
In 1950, the Rams took the Cleveland Browns into the last minute of the NFL title game before the Browns won by a field goal. In the 1951 championship game at the Coliseum, Towler scored a third-quarter touchdown to give the Rams a 14-10 lead.
The next season, Towler led the NFL in rushing with 894 yards. He also scored 10 touchdowns.
A four-time All-Pro fullback, Towler abruptly ended his football career in 1955 to become a Methodist minister. During his playing years, he had studied at the USC graduate school of religion and earned a master’s degree in theology. He later added a PhD in education.
Daniel Lee Towler was born in the western Pennsylvania town of Donora, the same town that produced baseball great Stan Musial.
In his senior year, Towler led Donora High to a state football championship by scoring 24 touchdowns.
He went to Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pa., where he graduated cum laude. In his junior year he led the nation in scoring in his division.
Towler was one of the great steals in NFL draft history. In 1950, he was the 324th player taken in the draft, when the Rams selected him in the 25th round.
He asked to lead the Rams in pregame prayer as a rookie, quickly earning the “Deacon” nickname.
He was proud of his role on the team, saying in a 1991 interview: “I asked Coach [Joe] Stydahar if I could have the players pray, and he said: ‘It sure wouldn’t hurt anything, and who knows? It might help.’
“We were the first NFL team to pray before each game. Now it’s a common thing. I think it helped with the team’s camaraderie and fellowship, bringing us together.”
Towler is survived by his wife, Rosalind, and daughter, Roslyn.
Funeral arrangements are pending.
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e903a0aff13df5d63d1cfa643633308b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-aug-04-me-30540-story.html | Bert Grant; Led Microbrew Revolution | Bert Grant; Led Microbrew Revolution
Bert Grant, founder of the nation’s first post-Prohibition brew pubs and a pioneer of the American beer revolution, has died. He was 73.
In failing health for some time, Grant died Tuesday in a nursing home in Vancouver, British Columbia. The cause of his death was not announced.
An outspoken man who railed against what he viewed as the bland taste and uniformity of nationally distributed beers, Grant helped spark the nation’s interest in microbrews when he opened Yakima Brewing and Malting Co. in Yakima, Wash., in 1982.
From that location, Grant built a closet empire, brewing six ales year-round and several other seasonal ales. His trademark style is Grant’s Scottish Ale, which he modestly called “the world’s best ale.”
“I thought if enough people made enough different beers, people would go for it,” Grant told The Times some years ago. “With the imports doing so well, I thought that people were ready to become accustomed to something better than Budweiser. The big breweries have always had this attitude that if you advertise your product well enough, people will drink it. The American public isn’t buying it as much anymore.”
The microbrewing industry has boomed since Grant’s small start and there are more than 1,400 brew pubs across the country, with the largest number in the Pacific Northwest, Colorado and California.
Grant was something of a stickler for purity at his microbrew and didn’t allow smoking in his pub or brewery, noting that “cigarette, cigar and pipe smoking gives an adverse taste to the stout and ale.”
Grant also was pragmatic and had a take-it-or-leave-it approach to consumers.
“It’s simple,” Grant said. “If you don’t like it, drink something else. I make it for me. I don’t make it for the masses. But a lot of people seem to like it as well as me. We’ve won a lot of awards with our beer.”
Born Herbert L. Grant in Dundee, Scotland, Grant was raised in Toronto. Because of the World War II manpower shortage, Grant went to work in the breweries at age 16. A top student in his chemistry class, Grant found work in the chemistry department of Canadian Breweries. At the same time, he was offered a job as an apprentice gold assayer.
“I chose beer over gold,” Grant said in his book, “The Ale Master: How I Pioneered America’s Craft Brewing Industry, Opened the First Brewpub, Bucked Trends and Enjoyed Every Minute of It.” Co-written with Robert Spector, it was published in 1998.
Grant spent much of his life working in the tasting and developing division for major breweries in Canada and the United States, but he recalled those experiences as “a frustrating time.”
“I’d come up with a new beer and the accountants would turn me down because it was too expensive to brew,” Grant said.
He noted that Budweiser’s success is its simplicity. “They made a beer that nobody could object to,” he said.
Grant realized some taste buds “will never mature.”
“There will always be people who like Velveeta, but I’m not one of them.”
In 1995, Grant sold his brewery to Stimson Lane Ltd., the maker of Chateau Ste. Michelle wines. Last year, Yakima Brewing produced 10,000 barrels of beer.
Grant is survived by two sons and three daughters.
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b3192e2fac2bafa18aee084a89112b96 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-aug-08-me-31713-story.html | Jorge Amado; Writer Revered as ‘Balzac of Brazil’ | Jorge Amado; Writer Revered as ‘Balzac of Brazil’
Jorge Amado, considered Brazil’s greatest contemporary writer for raucous, bawdy novels that celebrate his country’s underclasses, has died. He was 88.
Amado died Monday evening, hours after being admitted to Alianca Hospital in Salvador in the northeastern state of Bahia. The cause of death was heart and lung failure.
Amado was hospitalized several times in recent years because of diabetes and heart problems. In late June he was admitted to a Sao Paulo hospital for high blood sugar and chest pains, briefly fell into a coma and spent several days on a respirator before being released July 16.
His 32 novels have been published in 50 languages and have sold millions of copies. Among his best-known works are “Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands” and “Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon,” both of which were made into movies starring Sonia Braga.
Amado’s leftist politics and frank portrayals of sex made him a controversial author. He was twice jailed by the Brazilian government and his books were publicly burned. He spent many years living in exile in Argentina and Paris before returning to Brazil.
The revered author was variously referred to as the “Pele of the written word” and the “Balzac of Brazil.” Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa called him not only “one of the greatest writers alive,” but “one of the most entertaining.”
But Amado preferred to call himself “a novelist of prostitutes and good-for-nothings” who, like Llosa and Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, sought to illuminate the national character.
He set his novels in the rugged, poverty-stricken back country of Bahia, the northern province where he was born. His characters were thugs, tramps, peasants, taxi drivers, sailors and other colorful members of Brazil’s lower classes.
“The hero of my novels is the Brazilian people,” he once told an interviewer. “My characters are the most destitute, the most needy, the most oppressed. . . . I believe that only the people struggle selflessly and decently, without hidden motives.”
Amado was born in the Bahian town of Ilheus and as a child witnessed the rise and fall of his father’s fortunes. Ruined in a flood, his father, a cocoa farmer, turned to making and selling wooden shoes. When he saved enough money, he began to buy land and became a prominent landowner with a street named after him.
The land wars that made Amado’s father wealthy formed the plot of “The Violent Land,” which critics consider the most accomplished of his early novels. Published in 1942, it focuses on the bloody rivalry of two powerful cocoa farmers on the Brazilian frontier.
Amado’s literary sensibility was stirred in boarding school, where he read “Gulliver’s Travels” and “David Copperfield.” He would later name Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Francois Rabelais and Miguel de Cervantes as among his chief influences.
In the 1930s, he joined a group of bohemian writers in Bahia and wrote for a local newspaper while working on his first novel, “O pais do carnaval” (“Carnival Land”), about the slums of Salvador, Bahia’s capital.
In the 1940s he represented the Communist Party in the Brazilian parliament. He was exiled to Argentina in 1941 after one of his books was banned, then to Europe in 1948 when the Communist Party was outlawed. His years abroad widened his international reputation, which helped protect him from repressive movements under later regimes.
In 1970, Amado announced that he would no longer publish his books in his own country if the military dictatorship then in power insisted on prior censorship. Joined in his crusade by other writers, Amado did not have to carry through his threat: The censorship plan was quietly shelved.
His earlier novels were humorless examinations of Brazil’s social problems in which the poor were good and the rich were bad. He was criticized for sentimentalizing the poor, as he did in his 1937 novel, “Captains of the Sands,” which describes the desperate lives of homeless children in Bahia.
When he returned from exile in the mid-1950s, he decided that he could not be a writer as well as a political militant. “I made the decision to quit being a member of any political party, and decided to be a writer,” he said. The social realism that permeated his earlier works gave way to humor, irony and caricature.
“In ‘Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon,’ published in 1958, he explored the on-again, off-again romance of a Syrian bar owner and his cook, whose culinary skill not only expands the bar’s business but leads to a marriage proposal. Amado’s descriptions of steamy sensuality shocked readers on Brazil’s political right and left, but the book became an international success. Harriet de Onis, in Saturday Review, wrote that she did not know “what to admire most: the dexterity with which Amado can keep half a dozen plots spinning; the gossamer texture of the writing; or his humor, tenderness, and humanity.”
The lighter, more picaresque view of life continued in “Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands,” Amado’s 1966 masterpiece about a woman who can’t get rid of her unfaithful spouse even after he dies of overindulgence and she remarries his opposite, a hard-working, straight-laced pharmacist. Time magazine hailed the work as “rich and leisurely, as much verbal aphrodisiac as novel.”
Amado is survived by his wife, the writer Zelia Gattai, and two children, Joao Jorge and Priscilla. His body was to be cremated Tuesday.
Excerpt From ‘Dona Flor’
From “Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands,” by Jorge Amado. Translated from Portuguese by Harriet De Onis.
“Dona Flor made her way through the crowd in the wake of Dona Norma, who went clearing a path for her with elbows and her great popularity: ‘Come, step aside, folks, let the poor thing get by . . . ‘
“There lay Vadinho on the mosaic paving blocks, a smile on his lips, blond and fair, the image of peace and innocence. Dona Flor stood for a moment, looking at him as though she had trouble recognizing her husband, or perhaps, and this was more probable, in accepting the fact, now indisputable, of his death. But only for an instant. With a scream that came from the very depths of her being, she threw herself upon Vadinho, clasping his motionless body to her, kissing his hair, his rouged face, his open eyes, his jaunty mustache, his dead mouth, forever dead.”
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0187ab95e717e0b36f97ec008c34f639 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-aug-09-tt-32244-story.html | Happy Birthday PC! | Happy Birthday PC!
Your first kiss. Your first car. Your first job. And of course, your first computer.
Remember the excitement of opening the box, removing all the components, poring over the manual, and then making your first call to the help line? (It was probably closed.)
It might have been love at first sight, but for the next few weeks, you wondered what could have ever possessed you to get such an infuriating, time-consuming machine.
Eventually, you would make peace with this mass of silicon chips, rainbow-colored wires and whirling disk drives. It would transform many parts of your life: writing, sending mail, shopping, balancing the checkbook and even dating.
But this rite of passage into the Digital Age is swiftly becoming a thing of the past.
Children born in the last decade or so can’t remember a time when personal computers weren’t part of their lives. If there’s not one at home, there are computers at school, in libraries or at a friend’s house.
There were several personal computers before the IBM PC, including the Altair, Commodore PET and the Apple I. But it was Big Blue’s machine that first won the hearts of serious business customers and ushered in the era of personal computing.
To celebrate the anniversary of the landmark IBM PC, we asked readers to wax nostalgic about their first computers--their trials and tribulations, their wonder and bewilderment. We received nearly 100 submissions and added in the memories of some celebrities. Here are a few of their stories. Many were edited for brevity.
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Apple I (1976)
It came with a case and a keyboard--the video output was to a TV. I used it to learn BASIC, and I had it turning lights on and off inside our house. It drove my wife crazy because I would sit at it for hours with my back to her, typing in numbers and ignoring her completely.
She was the first person I knew to use the term “computer widow.”
Dana Custer
(Computer technician)
Santa Clarita
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Commodore PET (1977)
I remember leafing through a copy of Popular Science magazine and seeing an ad for a Commodore computer that had 8- or 16 kilobytes. It had an awful-looking screen, and it was $795. I thought I’d better get one because I had sons who were going to be in high school and might want to know about computers.
Later, I moved up to the 64 KB model and thought that was silly because it was more memory than I would ever possibly need.
I got them for the kids and then found I was fascinated by them. The first ones had tape drives. You would get a program like a word processor, put the tape in and then walk away for about a half an hour while the computer loaded it. But the first time I used a spell checker and it corrected a word, I thought, “We are getting close to God here.”
Bob Newhart
(Comedian/actor)
Los Angeles
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Kaypro (1978)
In 1977, I began what would turn out to be a 17-year career writing scripts for Bob Hope. At the time, I was using an IBM Selectric to churn out the jokes and sketches. A friend of mine, Bruce Howard, was writing scripts for “The Dukes of Hazzard” on what he claimed was a revolutionary new device called a word processor. One night after dinner, he demonstrated the strange new machine, and of course, within minutes I was hooked. I had to have one. It boasted a then-gigantic 3-by-5-inch screen that was green with yellow letters all in one type face--Times Roman.
One night, after discussing script changes at dinner with Bob Hope at his home in Toluca Lake, he asked me to retype several sketches. Ordinarily, changes took a day or so, but on this night, I rushed home, typed the changes into my Kaypro, hit Print and was back in less than an hour. He was truly mystified and couldn’t imagine how I’d accomplished such magic.
Ironically, he didn’t think his secretaries needed the expensive new devices--they used to retype his monologues and TV sketches on electric typewriters until well into the 1990s, when he gave in and computerized the office.
Bob Mills
(Writer)
Studio City
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Digital Group (1979)
It came as a kit from a group in Denver--I remember assembling it during Super Bowl XIII.
It was more a toy than for any serious business purpose. I’m an early adopter.
At the time, Radio Shack sold a keyboard kit that could only use uppercase. I played around--doing some rewiring and adding some things--so that it could do both lower and uppercase.
Boy, that eight years of college was well spent.
David Bradley
(A designer of the IBM PC)
Chapel Hill, N.C.
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IBM PC (1982)
I still have my working IBM PC with dot-matrix printer and crude, very early 3-D digitizer. Being in the violin shop business, I used them for appraisal writing, letter printing and to digitize the shape of a violin.
I mostly use Sony Vaio computers now. But occasionally when kids come to see the “Oldest PC,” I give them a demonstration.
Kyozo Watanabe
(Violin maker)
Los Angeles
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Sinclair ZX Spectrum (1982)
I was living in Italy and had been pondering for some time the new, intriguing notion of a personal computer. All I could find in Milan, however, were wildly expensive office automation wares. Then while vacationing in Britain, I happened to be at the very same trade show where soon-to-be-Sir Clive Sinclair announced the Spectrum.
It had advanced features, such as--this was the real clincher for me--eight colors. I was immediately hooked, although I can’t say I immediately became a user because, in my first taste of vaporware, I had to wait until the end of summer for my shipment.
Sandro Corsi
(Computer graphics instructor)
Fullerton
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TI 99/4A (1982)
The first computer to arrive in our house came via the noncustodial dad. It cost about $100. My two boys outgrew it, and we went upward to a Commodore 64 for about double the cost.
But ‘twas worth it. Both boys, now men, earn their living as info systems managers, earning way more than Mom who still only has a 386 without Internet.
Nancy L. Pasulka
(Legal secretary)
San Diego
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TRS-80 (1983)
I am a 73-year-old grandmother. At age 53, when writing a long paper for an advanced degree, I was introduced to the concept of a personal home computer. It was shipped to me from Perry Oil & Gas, a Radio Shack dealer in Perry, Mich., because they had good prices.
The word processing program was Scripsit, and to move a sentence or paragraph you marked the beginning and end of the selected content with codes, then marked the place where it was supposed to go with a code. Then you typed in more code to execute the process.
I’m now on my ninth computer, and my five grandchildren have been the beneficiaries of most of my upgrades.
Judy Gorman
(Retired)
Los Angeles
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IBM PC (1984)
I bought a farm in New Hampshire, and the next spring I purchased my PC for $4,000. Two months later, IBM dropped the price to $2,000. I vowed never again to purchase any IBM product and never have.
Tim Cagney
(Screenwriter)
Montrose
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Commodore 64 (1985)
I bought it used for $500. Stop laughing; it got me through college.
Brian Springer
(Computer specialist)
Santa Clarita
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Zenith Portable (mid-1980s)
Weighing 15 pounds and roughly the size of a sewing machine, it packed a memory of 256 KB of RAM with dual 5 1/4-inch disk drives. It cost $1,400. I used it on my first college teaching job and eventually traded it for a good pair of stereo speakers.
Bruce Henderson
(English professor)
San Juan Capistrano
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IBM PC XT (1986)
I got my first computer in 1986 when there were no computers at ABC News. I got it to write a book [his autobiography, “Hold On, Mr. President”]. If it hadn’t been for the computer, I don’t think I would have written the book at all. Television scripts are different; they are much shorter pieces of writing. I didn’t go into print [journalism] because I did not have the aspirations and discipline to be a prolific writer. However, thanks to the ease of using a computer, I could do it. Now they joke that they can’t stop me.
Sam Donaldson
(Television journalist)
Washington
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GDC 386 (1989)
I was just out of college and decided I should splurge and get a state-of-the-art computer that would last me awhile, hopefully a decade or two. So I bought the top-of-the-line clone with EGA graphics for about $4,000. It broke down about once a month, and I was on a first-name basis with the repair guy. His name was Minh, and he had two kids and lived in Huntington Beach.
I now stay at least a year behind state-of-the-art and couldn’t be happier.
Eric Altshuler
(Software Engineer)
Redondo Beach
*
Macintosh Classic (1990)
It was fifth grade in elementary school, and after much haggling I convinced my parents to buy me an Apple Classic. Why? ‘Cause it had the best games--"Oregon Trail” and “MathBlaster” looked awesome.
With my trusty ImageWriter II printer, I became the school publisher, producing banners, posters, signs and documents. Teachers would approach me to redo their ditto sheets.
And the ladies. Let’s just say valentines weren’t the same old boring card stock; they were personalized greeting cards from my publishing powerhouse at home.
Sheetal Shah
(University student)
Los Angeles
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IBM 425C laptop (1995)
My husband and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary with our four children and their families. We went to a restaurant for dinner, and they gave us this little black suitcase. Why would they give us a briefcase, as we are retired?
Upon opening it, we were amazed that the children would give us this strange machine we certainly did not want or need. We smiled, lamely thanked them and wondered if it was returnable.
Now we owned a laptop computer and had to learn to use it. We live in an RV resort in Sun City, Ariz., where there is a wonderful computer club with many knowledgeable people eager to help novices. So here we are in 2001, and the little laptop has been replaced with a Pentium desktop processor with more memory. And we are addicted.
We make beautiful greeting cards, surf the Net, scan pictures, download photos from a digital camera, stay in contact with friends and family via e-mail and keep our minds active learning all kinds of new tricks. I am 78, and my husband is 82.
It is wonderful to be part of this new technology.
Jennie Karnofsky
(Retired)
Sun City, Ariz.
*
Power Macintosh 8500 (1995)
I’m not an early adopter; I don’t believe in it. Ask the early adopters of digital TV how they feel about it.
Harry Shearer
(Satirist/actor)
Los Angeles
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Times staff writer David Colker covers personal technology.
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6452ca6d3588a9459885e4d62fa1759f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-aug-15-fi-34429-story.html | Enron’s CEO Steps Down After 6 Months | Enron’s CEO Steps Down After 6 Months
Jeffrey K. Skilling stunned the energy industry by abruptly resigning Tuesday as chief executive of energy-trading giant Enron Corp., barely six months into a job for which he’d been groomed for years.
Skilling’s departure follows a series of setbacks for Enron, including seeing its huge investment in the fiber-optic telecommunications sector turn sour and facing accusations of electricity price-gouging in California. The company’s stock price has lost half its value this year.
Skilling, 48, called his resignation “a purely personal decision” having “nothing to do with Enron.”
By leaving voluntarily, Skilling will forfeit a severance package that would have been worth several million dollars. The normally outspoken Skilling declined to offer further explanation, prompting analysts to ask whether another shoe might drop.
Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay told reporters and analysts in a conference call Tuesday evening that he would immediately assume Skilling’s duties and extend his own employment contract by two years, through 2005, to provide ample time to craft a succession plan.
Skilling and Lay were the main architects of Enron’s spectacular transformation from a natural-gas pipeline firm into a lean, high-tech trader of everything from oil to wood pulp to pollution credits.
Though solidly profitable and much admired for its innovativeness, Enron has stumbled lately and seen its stock price decline from a peak of $90.75 last August.
Shares of Houston-based Enron closed at $42.93 on Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange, up 78 cents. However, the stock tumbled in after-hours trading on word of Skilling’s resignation, which came after the market close.
A major setback has been the near-collapse of the telecommunications sector, where Enron had made a big push into the trading of fiber-optic bandwidth. A promising start for that business quickly turned into losses that reached $102 million before taxes in the quarter just ended.
“It’s very clear that they have been struggling with their business model of late,” Raymond James analyst Frederick Schultz said Tuesday night.
Enron is one of the independent power suppliers accused by California officials of price-gouging during the state’s electricity crisis. In the meantime, however, natural gas and electricity prices have fallen, and Wall Street has grown concerned that federal efforts to push for energy price caps will affect long-term growth.
Skilling’s sudden departure may anger some institutional investors, Schultz said, since the executive has spent time in recent months wooing mutual funds and pension funds to invest in Enron stock.
The analysts and reporters for the trade publications that follow Enron most closely seemed flummoxed by Tuesday’s developments.
Curt N. Launer of Credit Suisse First Boston asked whether the company anticipated filing “any disclosure to tell us any other items behind this surprising news.”
“There’s nothing to disclose,” Skilling replied. “The company’s in great shape.”
Prudential Securities analyst M. Carol Coale found Skilling’s timing odd, in that he was recently engaged to be married and has just completed construction of a large home in Houston.
“Something’s just not sitting right with me,” she said. “It seems odd that he would walk away from a severance worth millions.”
Lay explained during the conference call that the severance pay called for in Skilling’s contract, which expires in 2003, does not take effect if the separation is voluntary.
Skilling last year cashed in stock options for gains of $62 million, according to Enron filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Lay’s gains were nearly double that, at $123 million in 2000, according to the documents.
Such cash-outs were part of the cause of a volatile exchange between Skilling and Boston-based analyst Richard L. Grubman of Highfields Capital Management during a conference call in April to discuss Enron’s first-quarter earnings.
After Grubman criticized Skilling for not having certain financial information available, Skilling fired back, calling the analyst a vulgar name.
“He’s got some nerve,” Grubman said afterward, according to the Toronto Globe & Mail.
Top Enron executives sold 7 million shares at prices in the $70s and $80s, Grubman said, adding, “Now the stock is in the high $50s, low $60s and I’m an . . . because I ask about the balance sheet?”
Lay, who was Enron chief executive for 15 years before giving way to Skilling in February, has been scrutinized recently for his close political ties to the Bush administration.
Lay acknowledged Tuesday that he has met once this year with Vice President Richard Cheney and had two telephone conversations with President Bush’s top political aide, Karl Rove.
However, “most comments about my influence on energy policy or on the administration are grossly exaggerated,” Lay said.
Lay insisted that Skilling’s decision should not be seen as a sign of a conflict over Enron’s strategy.
“There is absolutely no change in our business direction or business strategy,” Lay said, noting that he and Skilling had been working together to formulate the strategy since the 1980s, when Skilling was still a consultant at McKinsey & Co.
Analysts said Skilling may have chafed at the length of time it took him to finally be elevated to chief executive. They believe he forced Lay’s hand last year by putting out word with analysts that he had been offered another post in London.
Whatever personal issues may have influenced Skilling’s resignation, the job was doubtless a pressure cooker.
Skilling spent part of last week in England, offering the company’s condolences on the death of three workers killed in an explosion at an Enron-owned power plant there.
The company also has been embroiled in a long dispute with the Indian state of Maharashtra over that government’s refusal to buy power from an Enron-backed plant.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Power Shortage
Enron shares have lost half their value over the last year after soaring in the first half of 2000.
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Enron shares, monthly closes and latest on the NYSE
Tuesday:$42.93, up $0.78
Source: Bloomberg News
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92fecec55a73b7e5e738048aac2f68d3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-aug-16-cl-34651-story.html | Raise a Glass for Al’s Bar--It’s Last Call | Raise a Glass for Al’s Bar--It’s Last Call
Around 1:30 a.m. last Sunday morning, Toast Boyd took what may have been the last stage dive at Al’s Bar. Boyd, the music booker for the seminal West Coast punk club, had jumped on stage to play bass with the Warlocks, a garage rock band whose bassist hadn’t shown up. She didn’t know the song, so she faked it, then departed the stage in classic Al’s Bar style--with a flying leap.
“It’s tragic that Al’s is closing,” Boyd said later. “It has always had more creative bands and a more creative atmosphere than any other place in Los Angeles.”
With the sale of the American Hotel, which includes Al’s Bar and three other ground-floor bus-inesses at the corner of Hewitt Street and Traction Avenue downtown, to Magnum Properties earlier this month, the future of the legendary dive is in question. Marc Kreisel, who has owned Al’s since 1979, did not want to be interviewed for this story, but is hoping to reclaim the lease on the bar.
Most people involved with the club, however, think it’s over for Al’s Bar as we know it. If this is the case, Al’s has ended its reign as both the West Coast’s oldest punk club and the downtown artists’ district’s central meeting place.
More than just a haven for alternative music, Al’s was also a neighborhood bar frequented by artists, musicians, writers and the odd policeman or downtown working stiff.
“It was like a town hall or a town square,” said Scott Sterling, a former Al’s Bar bartender. Now a music booker at the Silver Lake Lounge in Silver Lake, Sterling said he tries to emulate Al’s Bar’s dedication to the bands rather than the bucks.
Al’s was a training ground to many hundreds of bands. Some, like Beck, Sonic Youth, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Fall, the Residents and the Misfits, went on to bigger fame. The Jesus Lizard is rumored to have a clause in its record label contract to the effect that no matter how successful the band becomes, it can always play shows at Al’s (which could legally accommodate up to 185 people).
Local bands, such as 400 Blows, Tadpole and Blues Experiment, maintained a Southern California stardom thanks to Al’s, and reinforced the venue’s stature as a clubhouse for progressive musicians working largely outside of the rock mainstream.
“The people who hung out at Al’s were the true artists of rock ‘n’ roll,” said Tia Sprocket, drummer for the band Die Fast. She said she was not dismayed that the sound system was under par when her band played Al’s recently. “People rocked out and destroyed the system every night. The whole place was like a moving train--it had a great soul, and you don’t find that in clubs with perfect sound systems.”
As L.A.'s closest kin to New York’s famed rock haunt CBGB, Al’s was unwaveringly dedicated to rock music and the rebel artist lifestyle.
Contributing to the anarchic atmosphere were band-sticker and graffiti decor and a chronically abused foosball table and pool table. The mood was enhanced when patrons enjoyed 32-ounce beers for $5 and enthusiastically disregarded indoor smoking laws.
“Tip or die” was the bar’s motto, shining in neon amid silk-screened posters for bands with names like Clovenhoof, the Eyeliners and Slack Babbath. And while many L.A. bands got their start at Al’s, the bar never encouraged music business executives to consider it a poaching territory.
In fact, when record-label employees called and asked to be comped the $5 admission, they would be instructed to tell the doorman they were on the “industry list.” They would arrive at the bar to learn that the “industry list” meant the cover was raised to $10.
Though Al’s Bar may open again, it is doubtful it will be the same club where bands like the Imperial Butt Wizards can set fire to the stage, as they once did--well, more than once. Magnum Properties owner Michael Meraz said he has set the rent at “around $4,000,” which is considerably higher than what Al’s Bar originator Kreisel was paying. And even if Kreisel or someone else ponies up the cash to keep it a rock club, they can’t stop Magnum from gentrifying the bar’s grungy, graffitied exterior, which some bar regulars say would change its character.
Kreisel, a downtown artist and entrepreneur, opened Al’s as a performance space in 1979. He reportedly bought the business from the eponymous Al, who previously ran the place as a truck stop cafe. “It was the only place downtown created by artists for artists to hang out in,” said Jack Marquette, who helped Kreisel book acts at Al’s in the early ‘80s. “We were always looking for the unknown, unsigned, underground talent. Like when I booked these three bands from Seattle that no one had ever heard of--Nirvana, Mudhoney and ... I forget the third one.”
Though theater continued to be part of the fare at Al’s, music soon took center stage. Al’s became known as one of the only L.A. venues that would book--and actually pay--obscure touring bands and fledgling local groups.
Al’s distinctive, if malodorous, decor attracted television and film crews seeking a gritty, punk atmosphere. Coolio, Bad Religion and Pennywise have filmed music videos at Al’s. And while celebrities could “keep it real” by dropping into Al’s--Chloe Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Tommy Lee, Sean Penn and Pee-wee Herman were known to show up--"the ultra-hip always stayed away,” said Gus Hudson, a frequent patron, paying the bar the ultimate L.A. compliment.
“The legendary status of the bar really sunk in for me last week when someone called me wanting to get directions,” said Stay-C Little, an Al’s bartender of 11 years who met her future husband while on duty. “He said he called the operator for the number of Al’s Bar, and the operator said, ‘Did you hear it’s closing?’ The guy asked her how she knew, and the operator said, ‘Oh, I know the bar. I used to play there 20 years ago when I was in a band.’ ”
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90a2c091fd0bce67225cec5df18c94b0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-aug-17-ca-35080-story.html | Recalling the Lessons of a Starry Childhood | Recalling the Lessons of a Starry Childhood
Singer Patti Austin grew up in what might best be described as a hallowed entertainment-world environment. Her godmother was Dinah Washington and her godfather was Quincy Jones.
“Sammy Davis Jr. taught me some hoofing,” she says, “and Ray Bolger taught me time steps.”
Her father, trombonist Gordon Austin, played with, among others, Fletcher Henderson, Lucky Millinder and Billy Eckstine--thus the growing years in which she was constantly surrounded by the shooting-star world of show business. And that experience, she feels, is the reason she has chosen versatility and regularity in her career. It’s also why she has worked hard to stay free of the seductive blandishments of stardom.
“I watched the people who passed through our lives function and dysfunction all over the place as I was growing up,” she recalls, “and I think I just decided that the payoff for having that kind of notoriety really wasn’t worth the price.”
Nonetheless, Austin hasn’t exactly had an anonymous history in the business. On Sunday night she performs at the Hollywood Bowl in the JVC Jazz Festival’s “A Twist of Marley.” Along with guitarist Lee Ritenour, saxophonist Gerald Albright and others, she will re-create tunes from the new Verve tribute to the legendary Bob Marley.
But, typically, she will also shift gears into a performance of material from her new album, “On the Way to Love.” Those songs will be part of a one-woman show about her life--bearing the same title as the album--that will premiere in Sacramento early next year.
This sort of easy movement from one interest to another has been characteristic. A recording artist in her teens, she then moved into backup singing and studio recording, at one time the unquestioned queen of the advertising jingle business in New York City.
“It was an era that I describe as ‘Let’s sell a bunch of stuff to people that they don’t really need and make them believe that they need it,”’ she says. “I’m not cynical, that’s just what happens to you after you’ve worked for 15 years in the ad business singing and writing jingles. You just learn what the real motivation is--money!”
Austin, who has no hesitation about expressing her opinions, is equally sardonic about developments in smooth jazz. The style, she points out, evolved from the late-night, soulful balladry associated with jazz and the blues--with her duos with James Ingram on “Baby Come to Me” and “How Do You Keep the Music Playing” as classic examples.
“But now it has become, for everyone but Sade, an instrumental wasteland,” she says. “Because the mentality behind it is that this music serves as underscoring for one’s life. And the ‘one’ is the one who drives the Volvo and the Saab and the Mercedes and gets stock reports from Barron’s--a whole demographic that the smooth-jazz business is going for.”
But she sees an upside to the process as well.
“The good news is that a live-performance audience has developed out of all this,” she says. “And it’s an interesting audience, because it’s all the discontents from the ages of 35 to 55 and older, who grew up with everybody from Louis Armstrong and Jimi Hendrix to Motown--an amazing array of musical tastes. They’re used to seeing people who are really good performers, and they want to hear good music.
“Now if we can just get the radio stations to realize that there’s an audience out there that wants to hear music that hasn’t been pre-processed through listening committees, we may really be onto something.”
Patti Austin performs in “A Twist of Marley” on Sunday at the Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood. 6 p.m. (323) 850-2000.
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Celebrating a Life: Trombonist Thurman Green never received the recognition from the jazz audience that he did from his fellow players. His steady trombone work made significant contributions to bands led by, among others, Benny Carter, Gerald Wilson and Mercer Ellington. He also contributed--until his death in 1997 at the age of 56--to the Clayton-Hamilton Orchestra. But Green, for all his skills as a bop-oriented player, was fully capable of working in more contemporary settings. And his work with Horace Tapscott, Hamiet Bluiett and his own quintet on the stunning “Dance of the Night Creatures” revealed a talent that was continually expanding into new areas of expression.
On Sunday afternoon, for the fifth year in a row, Green’s life will be celebrated by many of the artists who knew him best--among them, trombonists Buster Cooper and Phil Ranelin, baritone saxophonist Bluiett, alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe, singer Carmen Bradford and Jerry Rusch & Zing, a string quartet group.
Proceeds from the performance will provide financial assistance via the Thurman Green Scholarship Program (in association with the Los Angeles Jazz Society) to trombonists pursuing college-level studies. The first recipient of the award was the now highly regarded Isaac Smith. The program also supports students in the L.A. Jazz Society’s Bill Green Mentorship Program, and younger students studying trombone at the World Stage.
The fifth annual Thurman Green Scholarship Jazz Festival. Sunday at the Musicians Union, Local 47, 817 N. Vine St., Hollywood. From noon. $25 minimum donation includes complimentary brunch. Information: (310) 636-7571 or (323) 993-3171.
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Symphonic Jazz: Efforts to blend elements of jazz and classical music have persisted virtually since the start of the 20th century. The Paul Whiteman premiere of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” at Manhattan’s Aeolian Hall in 1924 was the first major effort. Numerous other combinations continued, ranging from Igor Stravinsky’s composition “Ebony Concerto” for the Woody Herman band in the mid-'40s through the numerous Third Stream works of the ‘50s and ‘60s and into Wynton Marsalis’ recent works for various ensembles (his “All Stand” will be performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and chorus at the Hollywood Bowl on Sept. 13).
That’s just a quick list, of course, with Jack Elliott’s American Jazz Philharmonic (which seems to have morphed into the Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra) the most important Southland advocate of cross-genre music-making.
An important new jazz and classical entity will arrive Sept. 23 with the debut performance of the Symphonic Jazz Orchestra at Royce Hall. The 72-member professional group was started by Mitchell Glickman (former director of the Henry Mancini Institute) and musician-composer Tom Scott. The mission, Glickman says, will be “to carry on the symphonic jazz history, commissioning new works and resurrecting classic pieces from the rich repertoire.”
The Sept. 23 concert, conducted by Glickman and Scott, will feature vocalist Phil Perry and the Yellowjackets jazz quartet. The program includes a newly commissioned work by Scott, the U.S. premiere of Russell Ferrante and Jimmy Haslip’s “Greenhouse” (with the orchestra and the Yellowjackets) and the reconstruction of Don Sebesky’s 1979 symphonic jazz composition, “Bela & Bird in B Flat.”
Tickets for the Sept. 23 Symphonic Jazz Orchestra concert at UCLA’s Royce Hall are available through the Royce Hall box office, (310) 825-2101. A limited number of VIP tickets can be purchased by calling (310) 876-8130 or logging on to the organization’s Web site at https://www.SymphonicJazzOrchestra.org.
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bd854e2e371ed560ae79b979810280a7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-aug-17-ca-35090-story.html | Did Katie Couric Cross the Line into Advocacy? | Did Katie Couric Cross the Line into Advocacy?
Katie Couric doesn’t need to leave the “Today” show and join the talk-show circuit to do on-air advocacy work on controversial subjects, a la Oprah or Rosie. She’s already doing it on “Today.”
This week, for instance, at the end of a taped interview with the mother and brother of confessed child murderer Andrea Yates, Couric told viewers where to send contributions to the Texas woman’s defense fund; the address also appeared on-screen.
“Any money left over will be given to women’s charities dealing with postpartum depression and psychosis,” added Couric, arguably the most influential journalist in America today.
Heck, she persuaded hordes of Americans to get colonoscopies simply by having her own, on-air, in March 2000. Couric’s National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance, formally launched that same month, raised more than $10 million in just a few weeks, the Associated Press reported.
Which is why, as her NBC News contract comes up for renewal, most major media companies, including Viacom and AOL Time Warner, reportedly are courting Couric to headline news programs or talk shows.
Couric gave the detailed information Monday morning about the defense fund, which was set up late last week, right after Yates’ mother and brother told NBC News correspondent Jim Cummins that they need help paying the legal bills.
“Six people since March, you know--I just got through paying for my husband’s expensive funeral” after his death from Alzheimer’s disease, Yates’ mother, Karin Kennedy, told Cummins.
Added brother Andrew Kennedy: “The prosecution has unlimited funds. And in a case like this, we’re talking about the general expenses of half a million, a million dollars. We don’t have that kind of funds.”
Still, “Today” spokeswoman Allison Gollust insisted that afternoon that the producers weren’t worried that inclusion of the defense fund address before the murder case is adjudicated might have given viewers the impression that Couric or NBC News subscribes to the idea that Yates was indeed suffering from postpartum depression and psychosis when she allegedly drowned her five children, one at a time, in a bathtub June 20.
Nor are they worried that having Couric tell her 6 million viewers this information might lead them to believe that Couric or NBC News believes Yates’ actions were defensible if she suffered postpartum depression at the time.
“I don’t see how it would suggest that NBC is agreeing or somehow supporting” the defense, Gollust said. “Today” has posted addresses for defense funds before, she said, although when asked if any had been given before a ruling in the case, she said she did not know. Gollust said the show does not have a policy about providing defense-fund addresses or phone numbers.
“This is a story that has generated a tremendous amount of interest from our viewers. We thought it was information that might be useful to them,” she said.
But Monday afternoon, after the “Today” segment had been rerun twice on MSNBC, NBC News decided to remove the defense fund information before it ran two additional times.
“When we realized it might send the wrong message, we didn’t include it in the piece,” Gollust said.
The defense-fund details also weren’t included in a cut-down version of Cummins’ interview Monday night on NBC’s evening newscast.
Gollust says that running details of the Andrea Pia Yates Defense Fund was not a condition of getting the interview for “Today,” and the decision to include the information was made by show executive producer Jonathan Wald, who’s been in the post for three months.
Yates has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to two charges of capital murder--one count of multiple killings and one count of killing a child younger than 6--in the deaths of the children: , Noah, 7; John, 5; Paul, 3; Luke, 2; and 6-month-old Mary. She has admitted drowning all five children.
District Judge Belinda Hill had imposed a gag order on lawyers, witnesses and investigators in the case, but because she allowed Harris County Dist. Atty. Chuck Rosenthal to announce last week that he will seek the death penalty, she allowed the defense team to announce it was setting up a defense fund.
Contacted this week for comment on the “Today” show segment, Harris County prosecutor Joseph Owmby said, “The judge issued the gag order to prevent this type of thing from happening .... This has been a most enlightening experience to me in regard to the press; other than that, I can’t comment.”
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8937aedd6b4d931991030013fdef881d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-aug-31-ca-40364-story.html | Clever ‘Jeepers Creepers’ Pushes Too Far | Clever ‘Jeepers Creepers’ Pushes Too Far
Victor Salva’s “Jeepers Creepers” has the scariest opening sequence of any horror picture in recent memory.
Trish (Gina Philips) and her younger brother Darryl (Justin Long), on spring break from college, have decided to take the long way home through sparsely populated farm country.
They indulge in the usual brother-sister banter, with Darryl bugging Trish about why she isn’t going off somewhere with her supposed boyfriend. Trish in turn razzes him about his bringing dirty laundry home to Mom. In short, they’re perfectly normal siblings with a basically affectionate relationship.
Out of the blue an immense, rusty old van bears down on them, threatening to ram them or force them off the road. After a few terrifying minutes, the danger passes, but as they drive by a boarded-up, long-abandoned frame church, they see the infernal van again.
A dark figure emerges from it and dumps what appears to be a corpse bound in a white sheet down a wide corrugated pipe that protrudes from the ground near the church’s front steps.
Trish and Darryl are spotted, and the van gives chase, but they again elude it. In the natural course of horror movie scenarios, Darryl’s cell phone has run down and he has no way to charge it.
Trish wants to get going as fast as they can, but Darryl wonders whether what they saw going down that chute was in fact a human who may be still alive.
“This is where girls are smarter,” Trish says, but Darryl counters: What if it were she who was enshrouded in that sheet and still alive?
Of course they go back, and of course Darryl, peering as deeply as he can into that canted chute, loses his footing and slides to the bottom. What he discovers won’t be revealed here; it’s enough to say that it’s gruesomely weird and not for the weak of stomach.
To this point, Salva has expertly built up enough sheer terror that his film is becoming uncomfortable to watch.
He shifts gears momentarily but then goes over the top, injecting a note of pitch-dark humor that turns “Jeepers Creepers” into yet another amusing horror-comedy, spooky and jolting but too literally preposterous to regain its initial aura of suspense.
The result is a clever thriller-chiller combining laughter with creepiness that should satisfy horror fans looking for a late-summer diversion.
Philips and Long are appealing and capable young actors, with Jonathan Breck supplying menace that is alternately scary and campy. Eileen Brennan plays a crazed recluse holed up in a dilapidated old farmhouse with cats too numerous to count but no phone, just when one is needed most.
Patricia Belcher is genuinely unsettling as a rural woman with psychic powers. Brandon Smith is the most prominent of a number of lawmen who are no match for the evil forces unleashed in the course of the film, which has been photographed by Don E. FauntLeRoy and scored by Bennett Salvay for maximum scariness.
As stylish as it is grisly, “Jeepers Creepers” has cult film written all over it, and it’s not for nothing that Francis Ford Coppola has been a staunch Victor Salva mentor.
MPAA rating: R, for terror, violence/gore, language and brief nudity. Times guidelines: The film is far too intense and horrific for youngsters who may not be able to comprehend that what they’re seeing is all make-believe.
‘Jeepers Creepers’
Gina Philips: Trish
Justin Long: Darryl
Jonathan Breck: The Creeper
Patricia Belcher: Jezelle Gay Hartman
Brandon Smith: Sgt. Davis Tubbs
Eileen Brennan: The Cat Lady
A United Artists Films presentation of an American Zoetrope/Cinerenta-Cinebeta production in association with Cinerenta Medienbeteiligungs. Writer-director Victor Salva. Producers Barry Opper, Tom Luse. Executive producers Francis Ford Coppola, Linda Reisman, Will Baer and Mario Ohoven, Eberhard Kayser. Cinematographer Don E. FauntLeRoy. Editor Ed Marx. Music Bennett Salvay. Key makeup & creature effects design supervisor Brian Penikas. Visual effects supervisor Bob Morgenroth. Costumes Emae Villalobos. Production designer Steven Legler. Art director Kevin Egeland. Set decorator Barbara Peterson. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes.
In general release.
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1f7af48c9ce11b879df28894032752d0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-aug-31-ca-40365-story.html | ‘Funny Girl’ Sparkles in Significant Restoration | ‘Funny Girl’ Sparkles in Significant Restoration
The revival of the pain-stakingly restored “Funny Girl” is important for a number of reasons. First of all, the musical biography of comedian Fanny Brice emerges as a true classic, as enthralling as the day it was released in 1968. It is a superb example of Hollywood craftsmanship in which all elements have been blended to perfection with inspired artistry.
Secondly, it is exemplary in the quality of its restoration, a three-year process calling attention to how much effort it takes to restore and preserve a motion picture--and how vulnerable even comparatively recent, post-1950 productions really are.
Third, there’s the electrifying, Oscar-winning screen debut of Barbra Streisand who re-created her Broadway triumph under the beautifully modulated and always controlled direction of William Wyler. Streisand and Brice were made for each other, and Streisand’s incandescent talent and wit bring to life one of America’s most beloved comedian-singers of the ‘20s and ‘30s, who had a second career on radio as the irrepressible Baby Snooks. Brice was a Lower East Side Jewish girl who never hid her origins; she was the daughter of a saloonkeeper (Kay Medford) with a burning desire for stardom fulfilled by Florenz Ziegfeld (Walter Pidgeon), who for years featured her in his lavish revues.
And then there are all those great Jule Styne-Bob Merrill songs, so seamlessly integrated into Isobel Lennart’s script: “People,” “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” plus such songs closely associated with Brice as “Second Hand Rose” and “I’d Rather Be Blue.”
Indeed, all the musical numbers, which were directed by Herbert Ross, are part of the film’s graceful yet dynamic flow, even the loving re-creation of Brice’s vaudeville turns and Ziegfeld’s elaborate production numbers “glorifying the American girl.”
What cinched Brice as a show business legend was her marriage to the gentlemanly gambler Nicky Arnstein, who ultimately went to prison for embezzlement (prompting Brice to sing her heart out with the torchy “My Man.”). The way writer Lennart tells it, Nicky was as good for Brice as she was bad for him, causing him to become ever more reckless in a desperate attempt to keep up with her.
After more than 30 years, it’s easier to appreciate how good Omar Sharif really is as the dashing, proud and gallant Arnstein. At the time, the casting of the Lebanese-born Egyptian star raised eyebrows, and it was widely regretted that Sydney Chaplin was not able to repeat his stage portrayal of Arnstein on-screen. The point is that the Streisand-Sharif chemistry is sensational on-screen.
If Brice’s life and loves have been mythologized in the process, so be it. One of the great pluses of the restoration, overseen by Tom Heitman of New York’s Cineric Restorations, is that it brings out the richness of Gene Callahan’s settings and Irene Sharaff’s costumes, gloriously photographed by Harry Stradling.
To this end, the restorers used the new and improved version of the Technicolor Dye Transfer Process, which etches dye directly on the film print stock, resulting in a print with fully saturated color--a process Wyler and Stradling had used originally. The film’s original six-track stereo masters have also been digitally restored; “Funny Girl” will now be heard in stereo for the first time since the film’s initial release. This restoration is the 155-minute version, complete with overture, intermission and exit music.
“Funny Girl” ultimately emerges as important for yet another reason. At the end of the film, Fanny thanks Nicky for making her “feel beautiful for a long time.” In reply, he looks at her appraisingly and says, “You are beautiful.” He is right, for in her first screen appearance, Streisand smashed the old restrictive Hollywood standards of physical perfection.
Exclusively at the Royal, 11523 Santa Monica Blvd., L.A., (310) 477-5581.
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34b2cc8e42c41dffaf89555e3751dd5f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-dec-02-ca-10479-story.html | Rewriting His Career Script | Rewriting His Career Script
While directing Owen Wilson in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Wes Anderson realized there was something different about the way his writing partner and close friend was acting during rehearsal. It had been five years since Anderson last directed him, in “Bottle Rocket,” their first project, which jump-started their careers. Wilson had become a better actor, but he had also developed an annoying habit.
“We were rehearsing a scene, and Owen was kind of mumbling and reading off the page and we had Gene Hackman there,” Anderson said. "[I said,] ‘You’re supposed to have it memorized.’ Owen’s like, ‘I don’t memorize before the rehearsal.’ [I said,] ‘What are you talking about?’ [He said,] ‘Wes, this is my seventh movie. This is the way I do it.’ Somewhere around ‘Anaconda,’ he made a shift which I didn’t even know about.”
Owen Wilson is a hard guy to keep up with these days. In the last few years, Wilson (along with Anderson) has written three movies, including the acclaimed 1998 comedy “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums,” a dark comedy about a dysfunctional family that opens Dec. 14. His acting career was boosted last year by the surprise success “Shanghai Noon,” in which he co-starred with Jackie Chan as an insecure train robber, and by his role as an unctuous ex-fiance in the blockbuster hit “Meet the Parents,” starring his friend Ben Stiller. Earlier this fall, he teamed up again with Stiller, playing dueling male models in “Zoolander.”
But it’s “Behind Enemy Lines” that could change the trajectory of Wilson’s career. In the film, which opened Friday, Wilson stars as a Navy aviator shot down in Bosnia who’s hunted by Serbian forces because he flew over a mass grave site. Although he co-stars with Hackman (who’s also featured in “Royal Tenenbaums”), Wilson gets top billing (and $3 million). If the film is a hit, it could catapult him from a cult favorite to mainstream star--the next action hero.
“Let’s face it, it’s really Owen’s movie,” producer John Davis said. “It’s his first major leading role. He’s going to get very expensive very quickly.” The role is a dramatic departure from the unique--he doesn’t care for the often-used term “quirky"--persona he created from a Dallas drawl, a twice-broken nose and a sly, self-parodying sense of humor. It was Wilson’s acting range in “Shanghai Noon,” oddly enough, that impressed Davis enough to fight to cast him in “Behind Enemy Lines.”
“There’s a freshness here you haven’t seen before. That’s what I wanted. It’s the modern movie-star character: It’s sardonic, charismatic. It’s cool. It’s real,” explained Davis, who believes the old movie-star concept is wearing out. In “Behind Enemy Lines,” Wilson suggests a new, post-Sept. 11 type of American hero: the imperfect guy next door, Davis said. In sharp contrast to Tom Cruise’s macho fighter pilot in the 1986 film “Top Gun,” Wilson’s character was downgraded from pilot to navigator to make it more real--at Wilson’s suggestion.
His sometimes terrified hero joins a new group of offbeat leading men that includes Stiller and comedian Jack Black who moved up to romantic lead in the current hit “Shallow Hal.”
Despite the buzz around him, his life hasn’t changed, Wilson said in an interview a few weeks before the release of “Behind Enemy Lines” and “The Royal Tenenbaums.” Comparing himself with friends he grew up with who have married and started families, he said without any detectable note of irony: “If anything, it seems I’m behind the curve.”
At home in his modest--by movie-star standards--Santa Monica neighborhood, the New American Hero slouched sideways across a big leather chair, bare feet dangling, toes in motion. His younger brother, Luke, a co-star in “Bottle Rocket,” “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums,” was upstairs; his older brother, Andrew, who has also appeared in Wilson’s movies, popped in with his son to say hello. A yellow dog wagged its tail outside some French doors.
Compared with a Schwarzenegger type, Wilson seemed almost slight in person, a wiry 5-foot-11. He was as relaxed and irreverent as his on-screen persona, but unexpectedly open and thoughtful. He expressed surprise that anyone might consider him anything other than normal.
“I don’t know how it works when you become a movie star,” he said in the instantly recognizable Owen Wilson twang, half gravel, half honey, served up in the laid-back rhythms of his generation. “I think it’s something people have to call you.”
The 33-year-old Wilson said he judges whether or not someone is a star by how nervous he gets when he first meets them for work. “Like I was nervous with Gene Hackman. I was real nervous with [Robert] De Niro [in ‘Meet The Parents’].”
Wilson is currently filming “I Spy” with Eddie Murphy, whom he said he also considers a movie star. None of them seemed nervous to meet him, he observed with a short laugh.
Wilson majored in English at the University of Texas, never thinking of an acting career. “I thought maybe I could write,” he recalled. “If things worked out nice, maybe I could write some short stories or a novel, maybe go into advertising, writing little jingles and stuff.” It was Anderson who had the ambition and the drive for filmmaking, he said. They met in a playwriting class, and Wilson made his inauspicious stage debut as the crazy brother in Anderson’s student play, a comedy called “A Night in Tunisia.” As Wilson remembered it, “We only did it one night, and [the author] James Michener went and he didn’t laugh.”
In fact, Anderson said, Michener later complained that some actors these days have no oratorical skill or training, “and he made it clear to everyone he was talking about Owen.”
But then, Wilson said, he never liked Michener’s books either. “He wrote these huge, big tomes called, like, ‘The Universe.’ Or, ‘The Milky Way.’ It begins and spans 2,000 years,” Wilson said with an infectious chuckle at his own riff. “Why would I want to read a book called ... ‘Ha-wai-i’?”
There was a time, friends recalled, when Wilson would turn down an acting role because he would rather write. Now, he said that while he likes writing, he prefers the process of acting because it’s easier and more social. “You show up on the set, you make new friends, you get to be friends with the crew. Writing is more like having a term paper. You hole up and try to pull something out of nothing.
“The thing is with acting, it’s like I’m tapping into the same stuff I would do with writing because I’m improvising sometimes. It’s like the best type of writing because you’re forced to do it that day. If you’re given the lines you’re going to say that day and the lines are embarrassing, there’s nothing like that to motivate you to sit down and try to write something so you don’t sound like an idiot.”
Besides his brother Luke and Anderson, Wilson’s career has been most closely linked with Stiller. They share a slightly twisted worldview--as well as acting and writing ambitions.
Stiller said he recognized a kindred spirit in Wilson when he first saw “Bottle Rocket,” a poignant 1996 comedy about three friends who undertake a misguided heist. “The audience was getting it, but I was laughing more than anybody else,” Stiller said. “I thought ... ‘This is my sense of humor.”’
As a director, Stiller cast Wilson that same year in “The Cable Guy” as a smooth operator on a date. “He improvised so much in that scene. It was fun to look at all his takes. It was almost like they were from a different movie. In retrospect, I was seeing how I would want to work with him in the future.”
The two have worked together in four films since. They have become close friends, taking road trips together and night-clubbing as bachelors before Stiller got married last year. “Girls love him,” Stiller said. “He has that little sparkle in his eye.” Stiller said Wilson attracts women because he doesn’t appear to try too hard. Wilson has dated singer Sheryl Crow. (Luke is currently dating Gwyneth Paltrow, his “Tenenbaums” co-star.) A social life is tricky with a nonstop schedule in far-flung locations such as Prague, where he filmed “Behind Enemy Lines,” and Vancouver, Canada, where he is filming “I Spy.” He is next scheduled to shoot the “Shanghai Noon” sequel, “Shanghai Knights,” with Chan.
The fun of working with Wilson is that no one ever knows exactly what he might pull from, in Stiller’s words, “this library in his head.” In a scene in “Zoolander,” Stiller and Wilson, two competing male models, get into an insult fight. “He challenges me with a line from ‘American Me’: ‘Who you trying to get crazy with? Don’t you know I’m loco?’ It gets a big laugh. It’s his own personal reference, and it doesn’t even matter if you know it or not.”
Whether scenes are scripted or improvised, Wilson’s characters talk in a kind of stream-of-consciousness chatter that’s part intellectual and part daffy. In “Permanent Midnight” (1998), another film with Stiller, Wilson’s character, a would-be actor, muses to a woman at a Hollywood cocktail party about a play: “It’s hard to describe. It’s 50% avant pop; 50% Sam Shepherd meets Arthur C. Clarke.” As an inept train robber in “Shanghai Noon,” Wilson returns some jewelry to a pretty female passenger. “Is this the first time you’ve seen an outlaw? Scared? Kind of excited too?” he asks, pursing his lips in a kiss. In a dream sequence, he confides to a bed full of fun-loving working girls, “I felt like all the other cowboys hated my guts.”
“He’s got this kind of obviously very laid-back view of the world,” Stiller said. “Some people can imitate him, but nobody can understand where it comes from.”
Wilson grew up in Dallas, the middle child of Irish Catholic parents who were both funny and creative; his mother is a photographer, his father a writer. The family is prone to a melancholy moodiness, an “Irish strain of depression,” Wilson said, that goes back generations. “The Irish way of dealing with that is humor,” he added.
It’s not the type of humor that produces jokes, but rather the sort that comes from real life. To Wilson, typical comedies are not funny. But the scenes in “Raging Bull” in which Robert De Niro’s prizefighter reveals his insecurities and jealousies to his brother, played by Joe Pesci, crack him up.
Wilson’s parents encouraged their children to read and act. His father took them to movies--Hackman was their dad’s favorite--but they weren’t allowed to watch TV. Luke Wilson said he looked up to his brother, three years older, and picked up the books he had read, such as “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or the “Great Brain” series by John D. Fitzgerald about a silver-tongued con artist. Like the fictional models, the boys were troublemakers.
Recalled Luke: “I can remember my dad getting irritated with us as kids all hanging around together. He said when we got together, we were our own lowest common denominator.”
Owen broke his nose twice, once in a high school scuffle, once playing football with friends. He’s surprised that people sometimes tell him, “You look kind of odd, disfigured.” Some say it’s the crooked nose that sets him apart. But he said, “You know, probably my nose wouldn’t have been that great even if it hadn’t been broken.” Expelled from prep school for cheating, Owen said at least he didn’t tell on a co-conspirator (although he later used his name as a character in a movie). “There’s a shabby nobility in that,” he said.
As a result, Owen was sent to military school in New Mexico. “It defined Owen in a way,” Luke said. “He dealt with the adversity of getting expelled. It was there he met a kid that later introduced him to Wes. It was strange the things that happened.”
People in Dallas aren’t much impressed with Hollywood, Luke said. When he returns there, he gets the feeling that people think they are in a weird business. “It’s not oil or real estate. These people look at it like, ‘So are you just going to see where this whole Hollywood thing takes you?”’
In the filmmaking community of Austin, however, everyone knew who Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson were, said Tom Schatz, a professor in the film school at their alma mater, the University of Texas."Owen didn’t even need the film school part of it,” Schatz said, somewhat chagrined that probably the school’s best-known filmmakers never went through his department.
“He didn’t even need our equipment. The combination of talent and ambition will get [people like Wilson and Anderson] where they want to go. These people are extremely rare. This is a tough business. The number of fresh and sophisticated flameouts is incredible.”
When they wrote “Bottle Rocket,” Wilson and Anderson shared a one-bedroom apartment with up to three friends to avoid getting real jobs. “We could have been going to some jobs and saving up a thousand dollars a month to make a movie, but we never did that,” Anderson said. “We were just ambitious to try to get somebody else to give us money to make the movie.”
They’re still proud of “Bottle Rocket,” although the film never found much of an audience. To Wilson, the lack of early success “allowed us to quietly keep working. Each movie built on the last [one].”
“I think our movies have gotten better and better. Wes did such a great job on ‘Bottle Rocket,’ but ‘Royal Tenenbaums’ is so much further along. The movie is bigger and more complicated and managed to weave the various family personalities into a unified tone and vision.”
“The Royal Tenenbaums” continues a theme of forgiveness and healing that runs through the pair’s first two movies, according to Wilson. “This guy [Royal Tenenbaum, played by Hackman] kind of abandons his family, and he’s able to work his way back in. We put the characters through a lot, and in the end, it’s no hard feelings. I think it’s an element that Wes and I seem to respond to. Our humor isn’t mean-spirited. There’s a sweet quality.”
Anderson is wistful and a little sad that Wilson’s career is taking them further apart. An actor, after all, lives a different, more public life than that of a director.
“Owen and I have created a sensibility together. We formed each other. Over 10 years or so, we have made our own voice. Owen is acting a lot more lately, and it’s hard for him to be around for all this stuff.... He’s becoming a better actor, and next time I put him in a movie, he’s going to bring even more things into the mix.”
Anderson says he has a role in mind for Wilson in his next movie, but he adds, “Hopefully, Owen is going to be able to make enough time.”
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626779fe1506e733046b7b4cf60eed3b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-dec-05-oe-ijaz05-story.html | Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize | Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize
President Clinton and his national security team ignored several opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden and his terrorist associates, including one as late as last year.
I know because I negotiated more than one of the opportunities.
From 1996 to 1998, I opened unofficial channels between Sudan and the Clinton administration. I met with officials in both countries, including Clinton, U.S. National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger and Sudan’s president and intelligence chief.
President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who wanted terrorism sanctions against Sudan lifted, offered the arrest and extradition of Bin Laden and detailed intelligence data about the global networks constructed by Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, Iran’s Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas.
Among those in the networks were the two hijackers who piloted commercial airliners into the World Trade Center.
The silence of the Clinton administration in responding to these offers was deafening.
As an American Muslim and a political supporter of Clinton, I feel now, as I argued with Clinton and Berger then, that their counter-terrorism policies fueled the rise of Bin Laden from an ordinary man to a Hydra-like monster.
Realizing the growing problem with Bin Laden, Bashir sent key intelligence officials to the U.S. in February 1996.
The Sudanese offered to arrest Bin Laden and extradite him to Saudi Arabia or, barring that, to “baby-sit” him--monitoring all his activities and associates.
But Saudi officials didn’t want their home-grown terrorist back where he might plot to overthrow them.
In May 1996, the Sudanese capitulated to U.S. pressure and asked Bin Laden to leave, despite their feeling that he could be monitored better in Sudan than elsewhere.
Bin Laden left for Afghanistan, taking with him Ayman Zawahiri, considered by the U.S. to be the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks; Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, who traveled frequently to Germany to obtain electronic equipment for Al Qaeda; Wadih El-Hage, Bin Laden’s personal secretary and roving emissary, now serving a life sentence in the U.S. for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya; and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saif Adel, also accused of carrying out the embassy attacks.
Some of these men are now among the FBI’s 22 most-wanted terrorists.
The two men who allegedly piloted the planes into the twin towers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, prayed in the same Hamburg mosque as did Salim and Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian trader who managed Salim’s bank accounts and whose assets are frozen.
Important data on each had been compiled by the Sudanese.
But U.S. authorities repeatedly turned the data away, first in February 1996; then again that August, when at my suggestion Sudan’s religious ideologue, Hassan Turabi, wrote directly to Clinton; then again in April 1997, when I persuaded Bashir to invite the FBI to come to Sudan and view the data; and finally in February 1998, when Sudan’s intelligence chief, Gutbi al-Mahdi, wrote directly to the FBI.
Gutbi had shown me some of Sudan’s data during a three-hour meeting in Khartoum in October 1996. When I returned to Washington, I told Berger and his specialist for East Africa, Susan Rice, about the data available. They said they’d get back to me. They never did. Neither did they respond when Bashir made the offer directly. I believe they never had any intention to engage Muslim countries--ally or not. Radical Islam, for the administration, was a convenient national security threat.
And that was not the end of it. In July 2000--three months before the deadly attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen--I brought the White House another plausible offer to deal with Bin Laden, by then known to be involved in the embassy bombings. A senior counter-terrorism official from one of the United States’ closest Arab allies--an ally whose name I am not free to divulge--approached me with the proposal after telling me he was fed up with the antics and arrogance of U.S. counter-terrorism officials.
The offer, which would have brought Bin Laden to the Arab country as the first step of an extradition process that would eventually deliver him to the U.S., required only that Clinton make a state visit there to personally request Bin Laden’s extradition. But senior Clinton officials sabotaged the offer, letting it get caught up in internal politics within the ruling family--Clintonian diplomacy at its best.
Clinton’s failure to grasp the opportunity to unravel increasingly organized extremists, coupled with Berger’s assessments of their potential to directly threaten the U.S., represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history.
*
Mansoor Ijaz, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is chairman of a New York-based investment company.
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1af9fcd9b40c09f83513e9eab43f0b70 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-dec-07-fi-12290-story.html | Argentina to Raid Retirement Savings as Reserves Plunge | Argentina to Raid Retirement Savings as Reserves Plunge
Argentina, which is defaulting on its debts, said it will seize $2.3 billion of retirement savings by forcing private pension funds to transfer the money to a state bank in exchange for Treasury bills.
The government targeted savings every worker is required to set aside from their paychecks since the creation of a private pension system in 1994, after the International Monetary Fund withheld a loan.
Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo said the government, which has more than $2 billion of debt due this month, will use the money to pay state pensions and wages.
“For all intents and purposes they are confiscating funds,” said Scott Grannis, who helps manage $1.5 billion of emerging-market debt at Western Asset Management in Pasadena and has sold his Argentine bonds. “They are destroying confidence.”
By dipping into private savings, the government is showing the extent of its desperation after central bank reserves plunged, depositors accelerated withdrawals and the IMF stalled a $1.24-billion payment that was expected this month. The move--a presidential order that replaces deposits with bills that mature in fourth months--may presage a worsening political situation, analysts said.
Workers, already angry at the government for allowing the recession to deepen and unemployment to rise, plan a nationwide strike next week to protest the government’s decision last weekend to limit withdrawals. About 70 members of the truck drivers’ union tossed stones and eggs at the central bank and stock exchange, breaking windows and blocking traffic in an afternoon march.
Union leaders and legislators from most parties have called on Cavallo to resign. The minister said he plans to travel to Washington to meet with IMF officials.
“They’ve done things without even thinking about how it will affect our lives,” said Raul Castro, 64, an accountant, after leaving Banco de Galicia on Avenida de Mayo. “Everyone’s changing their accounts into dollars, but you still can’t get them out of the bank.”
Argentina’s benchmark floating rate bond due 2005 plunged more than 7%. The country’s bonds yield more than any other emerging-market debt in the world, at an average yield spread of about 40 percentage points over U.S. Treasuries, according to a J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. index.
The Merval stock index rose for a third day in four, climbing 10.6% for a gain of 24.5% this week, as some investors bought securities, transferred them abroad and sold them to skirt banking controls, traders said. Other investors bought shares as a hedge against a devaluation, they said.
The peso, which has been pegged one-to-one with the dollar for a decade, fetched 92 cents at private exchange houses such as Banco Piano.
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12ae5ee3d735d6c9887fe788348a0641 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-dec-19-hy-wheels19-story.html | Choosing a Mechanic Still a Dicey Proposition | Choosing a Mechanic Still a Dicey Proposition
To protect consumers against fraud, California’s Bureau of Automotive Repair shuts down hundreds of shops every year and revokes the business licenses of their owners.
In most cases, the owners are out of the auto repair business and the garage location is taken over by a new operator that has no connection with past management. But it doesn’t always work out quite so neatly, BAR officials acknowledge.
A crooked operator may use a “front” to obtain a new license while continuing to run the garage behind the scenes. In many cases, the employees who worked under the previous operator will continue to ply their trades under new management. And it is even possible for a former owner to end up as an employee, effectively managing the new operation.
“The legal actions are against the entity, not the people,” explained Allen Wood, BAR’s director of consumer protection. “Nothing in the law prevents an owner from working at the shop after his license is revoked. Most of the time it doesn’t happen. They don’t have to list employees when they apply for a license.”
Indeed, BAR investigators conducted a sting operation against Encino Body Works in 1997, alleging that the shop charged for new parts that were never installed on a state-owned car. BAR later revoked its license in a default judgment.
When The Times contacted the shop earlier this year for a story, it discovered that the two former owners were working at the shop, even answering the telephone to handle customer calls. The new owner, they said, was unavailable.
Wood said that in other cases, BAR investigators have chased fly-by-night owners all over the state, as they set up shops that defraud customers and then move on to new locations.
“Can somebody sneak through the system? Yes,” Wood said. “I am the first to admit that we get people who sneak through the system with phony names. We have a family that we chased all over the state for the last 20 years. They set up shops in San Diego, San Clemente, Sacramento, Fairfield, Fresno.”
At least Californians have BAR, widely regarded as one of the toughest and most far-reaching automobile consumer agencies in the country.
The bureau files about 400 cases of civil fraud annually against auto shops in California, 180 leading to the filing of criminal charges. License applications to BAR sometimes run 5 inches thick, and they get a thorough review, Wood asserts.
“On a scale of 1 to 10, we are operating at a 9,” Wood said.
But still the complaints come.
Abdelrazzo Zaghloul says he runs an honest body shop that attracts loyal patrons, performs professional work and gives customers a square deal.
But before he moved into the shop in Canoga Park two years ago, it was in the spotlight for shoddy practices under previous owners Pak Kwang and Magdy M. Thabet.
BAR shut down the operation and revoked their license. Allegations of consumer fraud at the shop, Canoga Park Auto Body, were even featured on the ABC television newsmagazine “20/20.”
Zaghloul, who goes by “AZ,” opened the new shop at the same address under a similar name, Canoga Park Auto Works, in January 2000. He moved from another location and kept several of the employees who had worked for Kwang and Thabet.
Perhaps coincidentally, consumer issues continue to dog AZ, who was found in violation of three consumer protection laws by BAR, including failure to provide a customer with a written estimate.
When BAR officials visited the shop one day, they found Kwang hanging around, AZ acknowledged. Kwang was only picking up his mail, AZ said, but BAR officials told him Kwang would have to get out and stay out.
The problem, AZ said, stems from the previous owners and their dissatisfied customers, who now want to press claims against him. He said the BAR violations resulted from a woman whose car was left at the lot for two years.
“I released the car without getting paid for it,” AZ said. “I lost $3,000 on the advice of BAR.”
AZ has found himself in another tangled mess with automotive detailer Kevin Reflow, who alleges that the shop botched repairs to his 1998 Chevrolet S-10 pickup.
Reflow said the paint job the shop gave his Chevy, which he describes as a show truck that has won awards, was defective. The brake lights didn’t work afterward. AZ also repaired body parts but charged for new replacement parts, Reflow said.
Reflow said he filed a complaint with BAR, though under state regulations the bureau can neither confirm nor deny it is investigating the matter.
AZ denies all of Reflow’s allegations, saying that the pickup truck is hardly a show vehicle and that Reflow hauls 42-gallon drums of water in it for his detailing business.
“It is part of my life to have to deal with Kevin Reflow,” AZ said.
The moral of this story is to exercise caution in selecting a garage or mechanic. Look for established shops with long histories in the same location. Seek references or advice from people you know.
And most of all, be familiar with your rights under California law and the information available to you as a motorist. In the last two months, BAR has given consumers a powerful new tool, posting auto repair shop licensing and violation information on its Web site at www .smogcheck.ca.gov.
*
Ralph Vartabedian cannot answer mail personally but responds in this column to automotive questions of general interest. Please do not telephone. Write to Your Wheels, Business Section, Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. E-mail: ralph .vartabedian@latimes.com.
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