OC man marries a Filippina he met online, raising ire & eyebrows; new online incarnation of LA-based Cracked Magazine; a Grilled Cheese Invitational judge prepares
Navigating Downtown LA with kids
(Off-Ramp commentator Jon Regardie is the executive editor of the Los Angeles Downtown News.)
Two things stood out the other day in the line waiting for a Clippers game outside Staples Center. One was the usher who was playing Sudoku. The other was the grown man and little boy playing “Ring Around the Rosie.” That was me and my 3-year old son George.
You don’t have to make your own fun downtown. There’s a lot for kids, as long as you don’t expect it to be a bubble-wrapped suburban playground. There’s the Central Library, Grand Hope Park, Grand Central Square and the summer concerts at Cal Plaza. We’ve seen Heidi Duckler’s site-specific dance company three times and we’ve eaten sausages and fries at Wurstküche. We’ve wandered through festivals in Chinatown and Little Tokyo, taking the Gold Line when possible.
Once, on the way to MOCA, we saw street performers dressed as Mary Poppins and Bert – that’s when the musical was at the Ahmanson. Our then 3-year-old Vivian had no idea it was not the Mary Poppins from the movie. She was so awestruck she couldn’t speak to Busker Mary.
Once inside MOCA, I told Vivian to let me know if she was interested in one of the artworks, and I’d lift her up so she could see it closely. That was a great idea for the splattered Jackson Pollock paintings. But it didn’t work so well for the photo of a junkie shooting up.
“What’s he doing, Daddy?”
“Umm …” I said, “He’s taking medicine.”
I took Vivian to her first Clippers game when she was 2, which in the pre-Chris Paul-Blake Griffin era might have been tantamount to child abuse. She made it through half the game and insisted on introducing herself to people next to us. She’s been to five games by now, knows who Griffin is, and, after yelling “De-FENSE! De-FENSE!” always asks, “Did I help the Clippers that time?”
The kids have also seen the Harlem Globetrotters at Staples, and while they laughed, they didn’t get all the nuances. Vivian was worried that the Globetrotters might lose.
I’ve learned a few things about visiting Staples Center with the under-5 set: you can’t get there early enough; you can’t underestimate how appealing the souvenirs are; and you have no idea exactly what will capture their attention. Vivian’s favorite part of her first Clippers game was the cheerleaders who, she said, “dance real hard.”
There’s another important thing I’ve learned about Staples and kids: The restrooms are nice. Unlike Dodger Stadium, which has metal troughs and conditions more fitting for Visigoths than visiting families, Staples’ restrooms are clean and well-lit.
George fared pretty well at his first Clippers game. He wasn’t very conversational with our neighbors, but he was intrigued by the Kiss Cam, and when other kids were shown waving on the Jumbotron, George usually waved back. He made it through the whole game, didn’t cry once, and the Clippers won. When I asked later what his favorite part of the game was, he answered, “Not anything.” But during dinner the next evening, he couldn’t stop chanting “De-FENSE!”
PST PM - Post Mortem on Pacific Standard Time with Getty Fdn Director
The body is still warm (there are still a couple exhibits ongoing) but Pacific Standard Time, perhaps the world's most ambitious art endeavor, wrapped up at the end of March. All the numbers aren't in yet - the official post mortem isn't until this summer - but it seems clear that PST was a success.
It began as an effort to preserve fragile archives of art created in Los Angeles in the post-war period, and blossomed into a full-scale celebration of the region's creativity and impact on the greater art world, involving scores of museums and galleries - and radio stations including 89.3-KPCC.
At the Getty's annual press luncheon, Deborah Marrow, director of the Getty Foundation, said she's already looking forward to the next huge collaboration... in a few years, please.
In brief, two of the things Marrow said went right:
-- They allowed time and resources for research - about five years.
-- The joint marketing campaign worked. Everyone was saying "Pacific Standard Time."
"And I would say our initial goal, which was to rescue an endangered history, has been met. These exhibitions told the story - told many many stories - of art in LA int he post-war decades, and now there are 30-some odd catalogs that remain to document that history, and archives that are accessible for future research."
What didn't work? Too soon to tell, Marrow says, since all the museum and gallery attendance figures won't be in for months.
Marrow says many of the organizers have already been contacted by other cities and organizations to explain how it happened, and how it might work for them.
"My Imported Bride" - David Haldane's story of redemption and a new family
(Note from John Rabe: This is the short version of David Haldane's full-length article, "My Imported Bride," in Orange Coast Magazine.)
I’m pouring drinks when a police officer arrives at my house in 2011. It’s a Saturday afternoon and we’re hosting a baby shower in our open garage. “We got a complaint from your neighbor,” he says, looking around at all the dark-skinned people eating a pig roasted whole. After he leaves, I approach the neighbor who complained, a woman in her 60s who has lived here for many years. She says, “Your personal life is so messed up,”
I understand the reaction. I’m a 63-year-old white man married to a beautiful young woman from the Philippines. My neighbor is just saying openly what others say with stares. That’s the hazard of living in Orange County with a “mail-order bride.”
Once upon a time, my neighbor would have loved living next to me. I was married to a woman roughly my own age with a similar ethnic background. We had two kids. The most exotic island we ever visited was Santa Catalina. It was the suburban dream and we assumed it would last forever.
Then everything fell apart. It was my fault. One day I realized I’d become an American stereotype: the middle-aged husband who imagines something better over the next ridge. It became my preoccupation and led into the bottomless pit of an extramarital affair. Because she is a forgiving person, our breakup was not as acrimonious as some. But for me it was the beginning of a long, dark journey into self-recrimination.
When I finally emerged around 2000, I was a different man; one who’d learned a painful lesson about family and commitment. But in the roughly twenty-five years since I’d been single, relations between the genders had changed. Many women now had priorities other than finding the man of their dreams. So I wandered without a compass in the dating desert, chalking up a string of failed flings.
I don’t remember specifically when it first occurred to me to look elsewhere for a mate, but one night I impulsively Googled “Asian women” and up popped filipinaheart.com. Aimed at fostering long-term relationships between Western men and Filipino women, the site allowed any man willing to pay a modest fee to advertise, respond to women’s ads, or engage in live video chats. It felt strange at first, but then I began noticing how friendly the women were. And eager to commit to someone like me.
I changed from an invisible older man into a rock star. Of course that appealed to my ego, but on a deeper level it appealed to my need for stability in a world in which the love I wanted seemed impossible to find. These women seemed to have traditional values, were open to matrimony, and dreamed of blissful lives in American suburbs. I understood that part of their incentive was economic – they wanted the American dream. But marriage has always had an economic component; throughout most of history—certainly in America, and especially in the Third World—part of what seals the deal is the idea that two can live better than one. These Filipino women were looking for something I could provide—a better life in the U.S.
I started spending evenings on the website chatting with interesting women. I quickly learned to ignore anyone who brought up sick relatives with unpaid hospital bills in the first conversation, and gradually narrowed my search over the next several months. One night, glancing at my screen, I saw a young woman resting her head on a desk at what looked like an Internet café. What got my attention was that she wasn’t trying to get my attention. And so our conversation began.
Ivy was then almost 24 to my 57, and I was stunned by her detailed responses. Two weeks into our talk, I confessed I was looking for someone to stay with me the rest of my life. She wrote back, “David, we have to realize that love is not enough to make a relationship work; we need trust, respect, time, effort, and total commitment ... I believe you can fall in love after you marry because … we should not let passion but wisdom decide.”
There were 33 years between us; had I completely lost my mind? What would my friends and family think? “You say that I am young,” Ivy wrote, “but I am fixed in my mind and know what I want. Most important is that I meet a real person who can be trusted and loved.” Sometimes I wondered if I was just being played, but her message remained consistent. And so I decided to go to the Philippines to find out.
Several weeks, two flights, and a ferry ride later, Ivy met me with a chaperoning cousin in tow. Before we could talk, she hustled us aboard a boat laden with pigs and bananas for a three-hour trip. We were headed to Ivy’s thatched-roof village on an island off the coast of Mindanao famous for its mangrove forests and white-sand beaches.
It was not love at first sight. Ivy, so effusive in her emails, was too shy to even look me in the eye, but her mother wasn’t shy at all. “So,” she said, getting right to the point after showing me a seat, “you want to marry my daughter.” We hadn’t made any such plans, but I didn’t want to be disagreeable. “Well,” I responded, “what would you think of that?”
The rest of the conversation passed in a whirl. What were my goals? Where did I live? Who were my relatives? What did I do? And—my favorite—what had gone wrong in my first marriage that would be fixed this time around? Eventually they let Ivy go alone with me on a stroll. We weren’t alone for long; on the beach we got a second round of questioning, this time from a large group of smiling locals. Obviously, the town was not going to let one of its favorite daughters—or any of its daughters— be whisked away by just anyone.
I was awakened at 6 the next morning by the scream of a pig being slaughtered. That afternoon the family and most of the neighbors enjoyed a feast of lechon, the roasted pork traditionally offered only on the most special occasions.
But this was just the beginning—not the end—of our discussions about the future. I made several more trips to the Philippines during the extended courtship that followed. Once I sat behind Ivy on a motorcycle as she gave me a tour of the island. During that ride, with the smell of the ocean and her long black hair streaming back across my face, I believe I fell in love. Later, on a stretch of white sand once owned by her grandfather, we built a crude wooden shelter with a heart carved into its ceiling. And finally, at the end of a long pier, I asked Ivy to be my wife. She said she shared my feelings and immediately agreed.
On Feb. 3, 2008, nearly two years after our first meeting online, my fiancé arrived at LAX, and we were married two months later.
I vividly remember Ivy’s first impressions of America. She had never seen streets so wide, never had operated a microwave. And, accustomed to crowing roosters, barking dogs, and squealing children, it was so quiet in our neighborhood that she often complained, “It’s as if we have no neighbors!”
We filled that silence with friends much like us. Absent the Philippines’ large family structures, we have created a substitute community. There are, after all, nearly 700-thousand Filipino-Americans living in enclaves such as Anaheim, Cerritos, Carson, and Long Beach. Our group is mostly American men with younger Filipino wives and, increasingly, their children. Today, Ivy and I probably socialize with more than a hundred mixed couples scattered across Southern California. Like us, most met online. Many also have age gaps, though not always as great as ours. And almost all of us are misunderstood by our neighbors.
I guess they assume I’m abusing Ivy, or that she’s using me for money. But while it’s certainly true that some women enter the US as fiancées pretending love to sidestep immigration laws, I believe they’re the exception, not the rule. Most transnational couples we know enjoy real relationships marked by genuine affection. And, while establishing economic security is certainly a motive for many women from underdeveloped countries, there’s evidence that these marriages often succeed.
For me, it boils down to this: traditional Americans don’t consider us legitimate. In a society that practically invented love as the only valid basis for marriage, anything even suggesting other motives is suspect.
Our son Isaac, who was born in November, 2010, has changed a few minds. My daughter from my first marriage, now 27, never voiced moral or ethical objections to my second marriage. But, having inhaled generous whiffs of local “wisdom” that it could never survive, she delayed meeting Ivy for more than a year … saying, “I’m just not ready.” But Isaac was evidence that we intended to see this thing through. My skeptical daughter fell in love with her little brother. And even my former spouse is now Isaac’s gushing godmother.
All of which brings us to the present. At last, after some dark decades, I am once again part of a happy American family. Ivy and I have lots of dreams; later this year we hope to take Isaac on his first visit to the Philippines, and one day we’d like to build a little beach house on that gorgeous stretch of white sand.
We’d also like to stop being a nuisance to our neighbors. To that end we have a plan. For our fourth anniversary, we’ll have another party with lots of foreign-born friends, an open garage and a big roasted pig on the table. But this time, I’ll call the police to assure them of our intention to follow the law … and print up a batch of invitations for the neighbors.
The (prat)fall of Cracked Magazine-- and the rise of Cracked.com
Mention Cracked to anyone over 30... and they think of this.
"In a 2007 article", Cracked.com describes its pre-internet self like this:
"Created as a knock-off of MAD magazine just under 50 years ago, we spent nearly half a decade with a fan base primarily comprised of people who got to the store after MAD sold out. Our latest incarnation of the magazine (a poor man's version of Maxim) only came about once the old Cracked offices were closed by the anthrax attacks of 2001 (the poor man's version of the fall 2001 terrorist attacks)."
...This is not entirely inaccurate.
Jack O'Brien, co-founder and current head editor of Cracked Magazine's web incarnation Cracked.com, and a former production assistant for ABC News, wrote a satirical news version of the show Primetime Live for the company. The segment -- which he now describes as the "worst piece of comedy to ever make it on television" -- was quickly canceled. But, it gave him enough comedic props to be contacted for Cracked Magazine's re-launch in 2005.
"A guy wanted to re-launch Cracked for an older audience," O'Brien explains. "The previous incarnation of the magazine was just cartoonists and people who liked booger jokes. So we were e-mailing people saying 'Hey, come write for us, we have this magazine! And, oh yeah, we also have this website.' But I mean, everybody had a website. No one really cared."
That all changed in 2007 when, after just three issues, the re-launched magazine folded.
Pop culture website Gawker.com at the time declared: "very little remains of the old Cracked, a Mad ripoff that had tread water in various incarnations for almost half a century." Others compared the magazine to modern-era "Men's Interest" magazines like Maxim or FHM.
"There was the idea that you had to put pretty, half-dressed women in the thing to get people to buy the magazine," O'Brien admits. "That was initially something we ran into re-launching the website too, this idea that comedy websites all appeal to this young male demographic and you have to write about sports and boobs and alcohol."
The remaining staff spent a few months circling the drain.
"I think everybody was kind of looking for jobs," says O'Brien. "We were just doing the website for fun."
And that's when things, in his words, "kind of exploded."
Turns out, while (most) guys definitely like boobs and boogers, they also like actual facts, like:
"The 7 Most Unexpectedly Awesome Historical Parties: Entry One -- Victory Day. Moscow's celebration of the surrender of Germany just might be the single largest spur-of-the-moment anything in history. Thousands of people immediately took to the streets to transform one of the largest cities on the planet into a sea of vodka, many of them still in their nightclothes."
Okay, that involves booze, but it also involves history. Cracked's Soren Bowie says he spends anywhere from a day to a week on a column, depending on the research involved. "It makes it more difficult," he says, "But I think that's the bread and butter of Cracked, its what makes Cracked Cracked. It's these really interesting little nuggets of information people should know, but they don't know it for whatever reason. That's what Cracked is. At its heart, it's information."
Oren Katzeff, Cracked.com's general manager and chief marketeer, says, "If I had to describe Cracked, it would be a little bit of Saturday Night Live meets Moneyball. We have a small team; we have a budget that's less than every other player in the space, yet we go out there, we put our players on the field and we beat them."
MAD magazine, amid company-wide cutbacks at past owners Time-Warner, finally landed at six issues per year in 2010. Its website is still in Beta, and mainly serves as a jump-off point to buy print issues.
Compare that to Cracked, Katzeff says. In 2007 they had a couple hundred thousand unique users per month and 3 or 4 million page views. "And we closed February at about 17-million uniques, and 300-million page views."
MAD is probably mad, but Cracked no longer seems so crazy.
Grilled Cheese Invitational judge Claudia Peschiutta loves cheese
By day, she reports the news for KNX. But on Saturday, April 28, she'll be a judge at the tenth annual Grilled Cheese Invitational at the Rose Bowl, at which chefs will try to combine cheese and bread in ways that will win Claudia Peschiutta's heart and palate.
"I'm going to be looking for a crunchy bread, gooey cheese, and I will award points for creativity. I mean, if anyone can set a sandwich on fire in front of me, chances are they're going to get my vote."
How is she preparing? "How does one prepare for an event like this?" she ponders, an event her whole life has been leading up to. Her subtle strategy: "I may try to not eat a lot in the days leading up to to the Invitational so I can eat as much as possible when I'm there."
From triceratops to wormholes, new book and art prep you for time travel
This week marks the 51st anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's trip as the first human into outer space. But who will follow his footsteps and be the first explorer into … time?
“So You Created a Wormhole: The Time Traveler's Guide to Time Travel," by Phil Hornshaw and Nick Hurwitch, gives aspiring time travelers a guide to do’s and don’ts in any era they might wind up in. From how to befriend a Triceratops, to tips on living underground when robots inevitably rise up against humans, the book has you covered in any time period.
"One of the fun things about writing the book was to reconstruct history with using both history and pop culture. So we can figure out where Klingons fit into the mix and how the robot uprising fits into our own timeline," Hurwitch says. "Back to the Future," "Terminator," and "Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure" are just a few of the movies used for inspiration.
They shared some must-do's while time period hopping:
"Ride a dinosaur; it’s one of the great thrills in life."
"Be a cowboy; try not to get shot."
"Get dysentery, that stuff is a lot of fun. Get tied to some railroad tracks."
They’ve also teamed up with iam8bit in L.A., where 40 artists are exploring the theme of time travel throughout movies and music in a new exhibit.
The authors took a look at some of the pieces featured in the gallery. "Abraham Lincoln is made completely of felt by the talented Kelice Penney. This is an homage to Abraham Lincoln in 'Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,' where they gather up historical figures of note to bring them back to ace their history final," Hurwitch says.
However, Hornshaw was not so impressed with the time travel in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure." "You can’t just gather up historical figures like that. That’s crazy. As soon as you bring someone from their timeline they’re gone, right? So you might get Napoleon and Lincoln and all of these people, but they might not be as important once they leave. You have all of these people, but they might not be as important and your teacher is going ‘Who are these people?’"
Before you start battling Vikings and space marines, Hurwitch says there are some rules you should really try to follow. "A lot of rules are pulled from our favorite time travel movies, such as 'Back to the Future,' so don’t make out with your parents in the past. Or in the present, just never make out with your parents." Noted.
"We try to recommend people against doing things like trying to go fix events of which they were a part," he says. "It really just gets messy and you can’t actually do it. It’s really difficult to change the past. History’s more powerful and time is more powerful than any one person, even someone as powerful as a time traveler or as horrible as Hitler can’t contend with the power of time. So, I mean, you could kill Hitler and then maybe someone worse takes his place," Hurwitch says. "You could disallow for your own existence, and then how would you ever go back? You’d create a paradox and then you’d implode the whole universe. And then, that makes you way worse than anybody in history."
Explore the universe, but whatever you do, please don’t implode the universe.
California might issue vintage-style license plates under new bill
It's not a big thing, but it's important to a lot of people.
Mike Gatto, a Democratic Assemblyman from LA, announced today that the Assembly Transportation Committee passed CA Assembly Bill (AB) 1658. That's the California Legacy License Plate Program, his bill that would let drivers pick a vintage-style California license plate from the three styles above.
In a news release Gatto says, “Aside from not salting our roads, California doesn’t often do much for automobile enthusiasts. This is an easy way for the state to make life a little more enjoyable for those of us who appreciate the classic era of automobile design.”
There's only one hitch, and it's not the chrome knob beneath the license plate. It's that the state has to receive at least 7,500 paid applications for the plates before it'll start issuing them.
Gatto would not comment on whether having the appropriate plate on my 1980 Mercedes would make it run better. I figure it can't hurt.
Titanic survivors relived painful memories soon after the sinking
Saturday marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Two-thirds of the passengers — 1,500 people — died when the luxury liner struck an iceberg and swiftly sank to the bottom of the freezing North Atlantic. The morning after the rescue ship docked, a U.S. Senate committee began interviewing the Titanic’s survivors to find out how an “unsinkable” ship could sink on its maiden voyage.
It didn’t take long for Congress to react. The morning after the Titanic went down, senators were already arguing which committee should be the one to investigate. Sen. William Alden Smith of Michigan was the fastest. Senate Historian Donald Ritchie says the white-haired Republican lawyer proposed his Senate Commerce Committee start a special investigation immediately.
"There were reports – and these were semi-official reports from the Navy, which was intercepting the Marconi telegraph messages – that the president of the White Star Line, Bruce Ismay, who had survived the sinking and was on the rescue ship coming to New York, intended to return to England immediately and take the British crew with him," Ritchie said.
Smith convinced President William Howard Taft to send a U.S. Treasury cutter to intercept the rescue ship Carpathia.
Smith took the afternoon train to New York. The Senate issued subpoenas and a hearing began at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel just hours after the Carpathia docked. Here are excerpts from the transcripts:
Sen. Smith: You were in regular communication.
Wireless Operator Thomas Cottam from the Carpathia: Yes, sir.
Smith: With the Titanic?
Cottam: Yes, sir.
Smith: Until the last communication was heard?
Cottam: Yes, until the last communication was heard.
Smith: What was the last communication?
Cottam: Come quick! Our engine room is filling up to the boilers.
After several days, the hearings moved to Washington. As it happened, the Daughters of the American Revolution were in town for their annual convention. The women, appalled by the tragedy, packed the hearing room of the newly opened Senate office building. Ritchie says it was noisy.
"And it was in the days before microphones that the Senators could barely hear the testimony," he described.
The hearing was moved to a smaller room with fewer spectators. Senator Smith asked most of the questions. "Didn’t beat around the bush. Just duh duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. He was drilling them and he got good responses," Ritchie added.
Sen. Smith: Did you hear any pistol shots?
Titanic officer Harold Godfrey Lowe: Yes.
Smith: And by whom were they fired Sunday night?
Lowe: I heard them and I fired them.
Smith: What did you do?
Lowe: I had overcrowded her. But I knew that I had to take a certain amount of risk. So I thought well, I shall have to see that nobody else gets into the boat or else it will be a case! I saw a lot of Italians - Latin people - all along the ship’s rails. And they were all glaring more or less like wild beasts, ready to spring!
Donald Ritchie says the memories were fresh, and painful for the people who were talking about them:
First Class passenger Emily Ryerson from Philadelphia: My husband joked with some of the women he knew and I heard him say, “Don’t you hear the band playing?” I begged him to let me stay with him, but he said you must obey orders. “When they say women and children to the boats, you must go when your turn comes.”
George Hogg, Titanic lookout: I think all the women ought to have a gold medal on their breasts. God bless them. I will always raise my hat to a woman after what I saw.
First Class Passenger Mrs. J. Stuart White from New York: The women all rowed — every one of them. Miss Young rowed every minute. The men could not row. They did not know the first thing about it. Miss Swift from Brooklyn rowed every minute, from the steamer to the Carpathia. Miss Young rowed every minute also, except when she was throwing up, which she did six or seven times.
Occasionally, others on the committee got in a question, including Republican Sen. George C. Perkins, a former California governor who’d run steamships up and down the Pacific coast. He wondered how important it was that the Titanic lookout didn’t have binoculars:
Sen. Perkins: Could anything have been done to save more lives than were saved?
Titanic lookout George Hogg: No, sir. The only thing I can suggest is in regard to the glasses. If we’d had the glasses, we might have seen the berg before.
Perkins: Can you not see better with your plain eyes than you can with artificial glasses?
Hogg: On a very nice night, with stars shining, sometimes you might think it was a ship when it was a star on the horizon. If you had glasses, you could soon find out if it was a ship or not.
Donald Ritchie says the British press criticized the “sensation-seeking American hearings” conducted by “a backwoodsman from Michigan.” He says they also wrote about kangaroos in Michigan.
After 16 days of testimony from more than 50 witnesses, the committee issued its report. Many of the safety recommendations are now standard on ocean liners: a sufficient number of lifeboats, emergency drills for passengers and crew and improved communications. And the many pages of testimony have become a resource for writers and movie producers — including James Cameron, who scoured the transcripts as he prepared his 1997 blockbuster. Senate Historian Donald Ritchie says the Titanic hearings satisfied not just curiosity, "but a real sense of desperately wanting to know what went wrong." He says that’s the important part of any Congressional investigation: to uncover the facts.
"We are ...:" Inspiring San Pedro sophomores write collective poem
Last year a San Pedro teacher asked me to visit his high school English class to talk about being a reporter. I did. And on the visit I also gave the students a writing exercise inspired by my days as a performance poet nearly 20 years ago. The teacher and I were surprised by what the kids wrote. I went back to the campus a few weeks ago to revisit that poem and record it for Offramp.
The first thing you notice when you walk into Peter Riehl’s 10th grade English class at Port of L.A. Charter High School is that the classroom had no windows.
It took a few minutes to realize that didn’t matter.
On the ledge that holds the dry erase markers at the front of the class, Riehl has lined up about 15 feet of books, side by side. These are the windows to the world. What’s there? "The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s collected stories, "Night" by Elie Wiesel, and "Woman Hollering Creek" by Sandra Cisneros.
Teacher Peter Riehl says the selection’s as diverse as the students. "There’s the students who read and let everyone know about it, there’s the students who read and don’t let anyone know about it, there’s the students who love videogames, the students who love their music, hip hop, rock, oldies. There’s the students who are happiest when no one knows they’re there and there’s the students who make themselves very well known through their words, through their actions," he said.
After I talked with the kids about my job at KPCC, I gave them a straightforward writing prompt, write the words “We are...” and complete the sentence. You could write it in Spanish too. They put pen to paper. I explained to them that in the mid 1990s the poetry group I’d been a part of, the Taco Shop Poets, wrote a collective poem based on the same prompt. This is what the students wrote.
we are the new age
we are the inspired
we are sparks
we are passion
we are the students
we are one
we are the athletes
we are the smile of our parents
we are the environment
we are the colors in a rainbow
we are the beads in a bracelet
we are the ones that want to move ahead
we are one in so many
we are just like everyone else
we are a community
we are the voices that cannot be ignored
we are the most spirited
we are the innocent
we are the neglected
we are our own sense of nostalgia
we are the tight grip on an adult’s conscience
we are the pen that reveals our own stories
we are the sun peeking through the clouds
we are the raindrops that cause the flood
we are the kids who dare to dream
we are crying out for help
we are ready to face a challenge
we are the people of tomorrow
we are lightning striking the ground, unpredictable never striking twice in the same spot
we are there
we are everywhere
we are nothing
we are everything
we are the young people
we are the foundations of society
nosotros somos valientes
we are the dreamers
we are the future
we are the laughter
we are the strangers
we are not alone
nosotros somos la luz de nuestros padres
we are immigrants
nosotros somos Mexicanos, los hispanos
we are the dreamers that dream forever
nosotros somos los guerreros
we are the strong believers
we are one
we are forever changing
we are the future
we are individuals
we are similar
somos muchos
somos el fuego en la alma
somos el presente
somos grupos
somos diferentes
we are the target audience
we are unorthodox
we are many
The first person singular “I” blends with the plural. Maybe it’s easier to begin writing about oneself by beginning a sentence with “we.”
While Port of L.A. High School is a high-performing campus, with a college prep curriculum, Riehl says there are plenty of things that worry them. "Family issues, grades, uncertain future, even at the sophomore level the future’s uncertain, not necessarily career wise but where am I going to be in three years."
"San Pedro, and as well as our schools is mostly Latino, Hispanic, mostly Mexican, as well as Guatemalan, Salvadoran, etc. But heavily Mexican, Mexican American and you know within that there’s a lot of experiences. Some are English only in the household, some are very, very bilingual in Spanglish, maybe trilingual, English, Spanish, and Spanglish."
Books have taken these students on Latin American magical realism trips and through a memoir of the Holocaust in World War Two. Teacher Peter Riehl says they also have a taste for tales of gritty, urban life, like "Always Running" by Luis Rodriguez and "Edgewater Angels" by Sandro Meallet.
"I wish we could do more creative writing necessarily but as a college prep school and things like that, it’s more of the analytical writing, more of the straightforward writing, which is obviously crucial, but they love being able to express themselves. You look at their binders and they have their pictures, and they got their nickname there written in big letters, any way to express themselves," Riehl said.
With that, my writing exercise with the students in Peter Riehl’s 10th grade English class at Port of L.A. Charter High School in San Pedro came to an end. For that moment, it felt like we had done justice to the writing in the books lined shoulder to shoulder at the front of the classroom.
The poets:
Carlos Gomez
Tyler Gloyne
Teiara Buford
Zaira Gurrola
Vianey Valdez
The Notorious Nery Del Cid
Joe Centeno
Nohemi Payan
Agustin Ortiz
Oscar Ramirez
Brianna Arquette
Gabriel Joseph Martinez
Miguel Salgado
Alex Espinoza
Robert Taylor
Melissa Hurtado
Angel Morales
Brittany Gomez
Yani Llamas
Viri Lopez
Leslie Valentin
Angela Wade
Matthew Lavarini
Skyler Bennett
Jennifer Garcia
Michael Pirozzi
Music on this week's Off-Ramp ...
The O'Jay's: "Used to be My Girl" - One of the best pure grooves ever captured on record, and a perfectly sung song. Here they are in 1988.
Ohio Players: "Sweet Sticky Thing" - The rumors that Betty White posed on one of the Ohio Players album covers are ... tantalizing.
Frank Sinatra: "I'm Walking Behind You" - Surely Sinatra's creepiest song, the lyrics of which recount his disappointed love for a woman who is now getting married. "Look over your shoulder," he sings, "I'm walking behind." That's not walking, it's stalking.