Father Boyle versus Mother Church ... Haefele on Haiti ... Mukta Mohan and the Big Picture ... parents find some peace by giving to a police station ...
Family turns tragedy -- losing a baby -- into a safe haven for other kids
Tuesday afternoon at the LAPD's Hollywood police station on Wilcox south of Sunset, a simple plaque helped find a silver lining in one of the worst tragedies a family can face.
The plaque dedicated the Miguel Leonard Padilla-Banks soft room, a place at the cold, hard, scary police station where kids won't feel quite so scared.
The room is filled with toys, Dr Seuss books, a comfy couch, and a bassinet. The walls are painted light blue, like the sky, and the walls are covered with pictures and decals ... just like a home nursery. In fact, this is what Miguel Leonard Padilla Banks' room would have looked like, if he hadn't died in his mother Xiomara Padilla-Banks' 21st week of pregnancy.
Her husband Darnell Banks had two young sons when they married -- she jokes they're a "just add water" family -- and little Miguel, named for his grandfather, was to have been her first child. Xiomara says called Miguelito their Miracle Baby because she'd been told she wouldn't be able to have kids.
After the baby died, she was devastated, and Darnell says it was getting hard to walk past the bassinet they'd already purchased. Xiomara's brother in law is a police officer at the Hollywood station, and so came the idea to donate it to the station, in case any babies came in that needed it. "One thing led to another," Xiomara says, and one weekend, "my sister and I went crazy at Target buying decals and Dr Seuss books, pretty much allowing me to get out of my system, for back of a better word, the opportunity to decorate a room."
Close the door of the room they decorated, and you wouldn't know you're at a police station.
But there's more to the story. Not every police station has a soft room, and very few have one as comforting as this one. So Xiomara is looking into starting a foundation to help make them happen in other stations around the city. And if that happens, thousands of kids could benefit.
Homeboy's Father Greg Boyle excited by Pope Francis, moves church closer to Jesus
UPDATE 3-13-2013: As you can read below and hear, Father Boyle was extremely pessimistic about the Church and the election of the new pope. That is, until he watched, with KPCC, the new pope emerge and present himself to the masses on St Peter's Square. Boyle was at Reagan International in DC; John Rabe was in the Off-Ramp studio in Pasadena; they were both watching CNN.
Look at that! Isn’t that something!? He’s a Jesuit, can you believe this? And then to pick Francis! Someone who is the opposite of pope in terms of simplicity and poverty, you know. Look at that!
Listen to both our interviews.
It's hard to talk with someone from LA's Catholic hierarchy without talking about the child sex abuse scandal. So, as we talk about the new pope, let's just say we wanted to talk with a local Catholic leader. By any measure, Father Greg Boyle fits the bill. He's the founder of Homeboy Industries, which helps gang members find hope, a job, and a future; and he says mass every week not only at Delores Mission, but at 25 prisons. He's a man whose word carries a lot of weight in LA.
Father Boyle grew up in a typical big Catholic family. "We were like a Norman Rockwell painting, walking to church every Sunday, and during Lent, every day." He went to Catholic schools all his life, and they had the Pope's picture on the wall at his house.
Boyle, 58, was born in the last years of Pius XII's papacy, but the first Popes he remembers are Blessed John XXIII, the reformer who charmed the world and served from 1958-1963 ...
... and Paul VI, who served from 1963-1978.
What he remembers, as a kid would, is the Pope's exalted presence, the pomp and circumstance, the regalia, which is one of the things that fascinates even non-believers about the Conclave. Of course he remembers the excitement of waiting in downtown LA for John Paul II to pass by.
But now, surprisingly, he says "I'm more worried about making payroll" when I ask him if he's following the progress of the Conclave.
"All politics are local," Boyle says, "and so in church. My church is in the detention facilities where I preside and celebrate the Eucharist." He also still says Mass once a week at Delores Mission. "To me that's the church. That's the people of God. And that's sort of a salvation for me, and the other Jesuits, that this is the place where the rubber meets the road, where people struggle and try to live the Gospel with some integrity..." And here's where this soft-spoken, avuncular man makes the sharpest criticism possible of the church he belongs to: it's not following the path of Christ. "The church ought to stand with the demonized, the disposable, always trying to nudge ourselves closer to the birth of a new inclusion, something that looks different from what we're currently accustomed to."
Then, Boyle tells me about a dream he had. He saw the Pope's empty balcony as if on TV. All of a sudden, the new Pope comes out. "He's a little short guy, and he was wearing huaraches (sandals). Somehow I could see this. And jeans and a guayabera, and the skullcap. And instead of doing the regal Papal wave he just sort of did a little wave, and the crowds went nuts. And I remember thinking, I'd follow that guy anywhere."
"So you dreamed about the Pope you want," I said. "Yes, absolutely." In his ideal church there'd be "less of a concern with defending the faith, which is a statement soaked with fear, to 'let's try to live the Gospel,' which is something we don't ever hear. He always hear about love the church, defend the faith, doctrine. Which has very little to do with Jesus. Which I think would be a nice change."
Should he be saying these things, as a prominent representative of the Catholic faith, possibly the most-respected Catholic in LA? He recalls when he was protesting the Vietnam War and people said, "Love it or leave it." He says he responded that he loved this country and was trying to make it better. The same with the church.
There's much more in our audio interview, including the name he'd choose if he was selected to be Pope.
(Photos: The Vatican)
PHOTOS: Instagram Challenge winner visualizes his subjects' imaginations
A year ago, Salvador Cappiello joined Instagram looking for creative liberty. He used the app for a while, but Cappiello wanted a more unique way of making images. He began to experiment.
Cappiello is director and founder of a public relations firm in Caracas, Venezuela. In PR, he explained in Spanish, “you’re keeping (images) in very defined terms.” To Cappiello, Instagram is a space without those terms.
He started making a series of diptychs, juxtaposing headless figures with cloudy skies. “My emphasis was trying to feel where somebody’s head was during a physical activity,” he explains.
Cappiello got feedback from his followers to push this idea further. “I always thought about people that stood guard… as people that would have a lot of time on their hands, and their head would be in the clouds.”
In Valencia, a town two hours outside Caracas, Cappiello came across a guard donning a bright red uniform with gold embroidery. The portrait became the bottom half of Cappiello’s winning image in KPCC’s most recent Instagram Challenge with Instagram Lovers Anonymous. The theme was “Manipulation,” in which we asked Instagrammers to alter an image to tell a new story.
In a way, Cappiello’s winning image is symbolic of his reasons for joining Instagram. And through the mobile app, he’s found a community of other “creative addicts,” as he calls himself. “The freedom to present these pictures,” he said, “to share and interact with thousands of people around the world, is incredible.”
Follow Salvador Cappiello on Instagram at @cappiello. Follow @kpcc and @igla to join in our next Instagram challenge!
With translations from KPCC's Edgar Aguirre.
The Velaslavaysay Panorama preserving the art of painting big pictures
Before there were movies, people would go to panoramas for entertainment. They would walk down a dark hallway, ascend a spiral staircase, and enter a foreign land depicted in a 360-degree painting in a circular room. Often these panoramas would have a soundtrack, creating a totally immersive experience -- sort of like a modern day art installation.
Though this technology was first popular in the 19th century, the Velaslavaysay Panorama--in West Adams--is trying to save the art form. Currently, founder and artist Sara Velas has a panorama on display called The Effulgence of the North. It's an immersive exploration of an arctic night scene illuminated by the Aurora Borealis, surrounding the reader at over feet in circumference and heights of up to 12 feet. Sounds of cracking ice and three dimensional sculptures expand the space.
Originally housed in Hollywood's Tswuun-Tswunn Rotunda, the Panorama relocated to a silent movie theater in 2004. Ironically, silent films were the same technology that replaced panoramas as an attraction.
Velas' panorama brings back an old world sense of entertainment, but more than that: "It also includes a variety of folk music and other storytelling methods, that people would have used to entertain themselves, and that have maybe fallen to the fringe a little bit," she said.
To get a taste of how people went to the movies before there were movies visit the Velaslavaysay Panorama.
The Pogues' James Fearnley on Celtic punk, firing Shane MacGowan, and St. Pat's
The way James Fearnley tells it, he and the rest of the Pogues were pretty uneasy about how Shane MacGowan would take being fired from the band that he'd helped make famous. But he'd become too unreliable, so in 1991, in Yokohama, they asked him to come down to the hotel room they were meeting in. MacGowan's reaction, as Fearnley tells it in our interview and his forthcoming memoir, "Here Comes Everybody," backs up Fearnley's contention that it wasn't just MacGowan's drinking that was causing his erratic behavior; it was the pressure.
The Pogues, who formed almost 30 years ago in London, a mix of Irish and English musicians who played Celtic music with a punk sensibility, were in trouble from the start. Their original name was Pogue Mahone, which means "kiss my ass" in Irish. The BBC didn't like that, so the DJ who championed them shortened it to The Pogues, which was done with MacGowan's other band, the Nips ... nee The Nipple Erectors.
Here's a spirited rendition of "If I Should Fall from Grace with God," from a 1988 performance in Japan.
Fearnley says the Celtic/punk mix "was odd, and I think galvanizing for people to listen to," and many Irish listeners were put off at first. "For some of them, it was difficult, but we quickly won them over because we were doing it honestly." In other words, it's clear from listening to the Pogues that they love this music.
Fearnley was not only a member of this seminal fusion band, but nearly joined Culture Club (!). He founded The Sweet and Low Orchestra, has played on Talking Heads and Melissa Etheridge albums, and currently plays with the Pogues and Cranky George, which plays locally on occasion. He just released his first single - Hey Ho - which we play at the end of the interview, and his Pogues memoir, "Here Comes Everybody," comes out in a few months.
You might see James Fearnley in the crowd at The Satellite in Silverlake as the East LA band performs its 10th annual Pogues tribute on Saturday, March 17th. Tickets are just $10.
(The audio: the first is the Reader's Digest broadcast version; the second is the 30+ min special podcast with much more about the formation of the band, meeting the BBC's John Peel, why Fearnley moved to California, etc.)
Marc Haefele reviews Amy Wilentz's 'Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti'
There was a time when you could think beautiful thoughts about Haiti. Cheap, easeful Caribbean vacations. Underused warm beaches. Charming, seemingly happy people. Heart-thumping music and dance. And a vicious, permeating dictatorship whose secret police practically monopolized the island nation’s violent crime.
Now, several major disasters and upheavals later, Haiti is one of the West’s preeminent tourist no-go zones. But that doesn’t mean it’s unknown to U.S. travelers of a different ilk, who come in the thousands to try to somehow better the poorest nation in the Americas, particularly in the wake of the 2010 earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
(A young resident walks past an abandoned helicopter in the middle of La Piste camp in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Any fair accounting of Haiti now ought best to include both these legions of do-gooders who landed after the quake and the 9-million Haitians they are trying to do good for. The former include ultra-celebrities like Sean Penn and Bill Clinton. The latter, very few names that any of us have ever heard of. Precisely between these two categories falls Wyclef Jean, the Haitian-American hip-hop star who was denied his chance to run for Haiti’s presidency.
Anyone writing about Haiti has to balance both sides of this human equation, and to avoid both optimism and bottomless despair. Amy Wilentz, who teaches at UC Irvine's literary journalism program, has been writing about the troubled little nation since 1986. She keeps these elements in proper proportion, and tells a rippingly human story in her latest book, Farewell, Fred Voodoo … "Fred Voodoo" being the media’s name for Haiti’s man on the street.
Describing herself as a “former naive romantic,” Wilentz is a recovering major fan of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the progressive former priest and Haitian president from whom so much was expected, and so little delivered. Taking into account the nation’s terrible and courageous history as the unique product of slave revolution, she marvels at how much can go wrong in its own attempt to liberate itself from oppression and poverty. And in the UN and America’s attempts to assist with recovery measures that sometimes seem directed at a new economic serfdom of $1.75 a day factory jobs. She relentlessly catalogs the unlimited number of failures of hundreds of impressive-sounding NGOs’ bids to reconstruct housing and keep people well and fed. She shows what aid programs do work and why — her heroes include a feisty US doctor named Megan Coffee and Sean Penn.
Problems occur with the constant close-up of her narrative—which sometimes falls into what critic Vivian Gornick calls the “Me-moir.” This is perhaps why she misses neo-colonialism’s larger context in Latin America—unlike South American scholars like Eduardo Galeano, who fit Haiti’s problems into a hemispheric history of oppression. Like other progressive writers on Haiti, she flatly ignores the effect of Haiti’s ongoing population explosion—it has the third highest birthrate in all the Americas, in addition to being the poorest nation.
But if you want a window into the livid present that opens to the smells, tastes, and feelings of this brave, unbelievably downtrodden country, Amy Wilentz’s Farewell, Fred Voodoo is the book for you. More importantly, Wilentz shows how choices we’ve made as Americans—as voters, as consumers—have helped create the Haiti of today.