Today on the show we'll have an update on the L.A. Sheriff misconduct scandal. Then, we'll talk to the Denver Post's new cannabis editor, we'll look at protests in San Francisco against gentrification from tech giants like Google, Rep. John Lewis tells us about Nelson Mandela's memorial service and explains what impact he had on civil rights, plus much more.
Update on the LA Sheriff misconduct scandal
Yesterday federal officials indicted 18 current and former Sheriff's Deputies for charges including conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and giving false statements.
It's all part of a long-running FBI investigation into misconduct in L.A. county's jails. The alleged crimes even include changing an inmate's name and faking his release after deputies discovered he was working as a federal informant.
For more on this unfolding story we're joined by KPCC's politics reporter Frank Stoltze.
Eviction protesters block Google bus in San Francisco
The Bay Area is booming with jobs and technology, but cities like San Francisco are becoming unaffordable for many residents.
Yesterday, protesters blocked a Google bus filled with tech workers to bring attention to the widening income discrepancy.
At the heart of this stand-off in San Francisco is the conflict that happens when a new class of people — buoyed by economic opportunities — threaten to push out established residents. But it's not a unique story; it's one that's been retold in many cities around the country.
Ellen Huet of the San Francisco Chronicle joins the show to give us the scoop on yesterday's protest. Then, for a look at this trend and how it's transformed communities and their culture, we're joined by Jacob Avery, professor of sociology at UC Irvine.
Denver Post's new pot editor takes a serious look at cannabis industry
If you have a particular passion for all things cannabis, you might want to run off to Denver and start applying at The Denver Post.
The publication is staffing an entire website devoted to cannabis, which will legally be sold recreationally in that state starting January 1, 2014. They're also in search of a pot critic.
Last week they announced the hire of the pot editor, Ricardo Baca. He joins the show to talk about this new gig and what his beat will focus on when it comes to the legal cannabis industry.
Rep. John Lewis on Nelson Mandela's impact on the civil rights movement
Along with the President, 23 members of Congress (many of those being members of the Congressional Black Caucus) travelled to South Africa to honor Nelson Mandela.
Representative John Lewis from Georgia was one of them.
Lewis played a huge role in the Civil Rights movement. As a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he participated in the historic sit-ins and bus boycotts in the South.
Lewis took some time to talk with us while he was traveling home from the memorial service. He joins the show to talk about Mandela's impact on civil rights in the U.S. and beyond/
Can the 2014 World Cup boost soccer's popularity in the US?
After Friday's World Cup draw, the international buzz surrounding the 2014 schedules, groups and teams has continued to build.
Grouped with Germany, Portugal and Ghana, Team USA fans around the country are are already sweating this "group of death" slated for next summer. But how many soccer fans are out there in the U.S.? NFL games still pull in 80 times more viewers than pro soccer matches.
Ira Boudway has written about soccer in the U.S. and the upcoming World Cup for Bloomberg Businessweek. He joins the show with more.
Tuesday Reviewsday: Illya Kuryaki & The Valderramas, Lee Hazlewood and more
It's time for Tuesday Reviewsday our weekly new music segment. This week we're going to be talking about rock with Justino Aguila from Billboard Magazine and music critic Steve Hochman.
Justino's Picks
Artist: Illya Kuryaki & The Valderramas
Album: Chances
Release Date: Oct. 29
Songs: Ula Ula, Helicopteros
Illya Kuryaki & The Valderramas are Dante Spinetta and Emmanuel Horvilleur from Argentina, and have been friends since they were children. Together they conquered the world of music with hip-hop, rock and heavy metal. Then in 2001 they amicably broke up for 10 years.
This album, which was just nominated for a Grammy in the Best Latin Rock, Urban or Alternative album, is the comeback project that also has elements of pop and funk and to some fans this is a very different duo. Nonetheless, it's getting a lot of attention; even Oprah said she loved "Ula Ula," which she heard in a Target commercial, then tweeted her appreciate of the song which stayed in her head. While the songs may seem super playful at times, they have deeper social and political meanings. Worth noting that the guys won for best urban song at the Latin Grammys recently.
Artist: Laura Pausini
Album: 20 the Greatest Hits
Release Date: Nov. 12
Songs: One More Chance; Non c é /Se fué (featuring Mark Anthony)
Italian singer Laura Pausini returns with a greatest hits album with music in English, Spanish and Italian. She's starting a world tour this week in Rome and will also be here in the US in early 2014. She has a command of the craft with a voice that has made her very famous in Mexico and Latin America and in some ways more noticed in Mexico than in Italy. Her collaboration with Anthony is a standout pairing that plays well with their voices. One More Chance shows her range and vocal strength. She's taken some deserved time off and and now she's back and stronger than ever.
Steve's Picks
Artist: Lee Hazlewood
Album: There’s a Dream I’ve Been Saving: Lee Hazlewood Industries 1966-1971
Release Date: Nov. 26
Songs: “Chico”, “Come On Sunshine”
There have been few real auteurs in pop. Phil Spector, sure, Berry Gordy too. But for the most part they were not performers. Lee Hazlewood, who died of cancer in 2007, tried to do it all — producer, performer, promoter, Hollywood playboy, writer and king of his own pop fiefdom. Most famous for work with Nancy Sinatra in the mid-‘60s, writing and producing “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” and other hits, and then as her duet partner on such hits as “Some Velvet Morning” and “Jackson.”
Starting LHI Records — Lee Hazlewood Industries, the name indicating perhaps tongue in cheek, perhaps not, the factory nature of the enterprise — he tried to build an all-encompassing pop empire. Today it stands as grandiose folly, as nothing from LHI ever became a hit. But it’s a treasure trove that’s only gained in value, and pleasure, over the years. There were attempts to repeat the Sinatra success, including more partnerships with him and women singers, notably Ann-Margret on the album “The Cowboy and the Lady.”
There were oddball concept albums such as “Requiem For an Almost Lady.” He even tried his earthy vocal chords at Bobby Darin-like crooning, but his desert-mystic cowboy ballads are his calling card. Closest equivalent might be France’s Serge Gainsbourg, and we can hear echoes of his influence in Nick Cave, Beck, Jack White and many others. The four CDs on this lavish box (there’s an ultra-lavish deluxe edition as well) collect the released and much unreleased LHI material, from subdued ballads to over-the-top productions, such as the horn-heavy “Chico” duet of him and Ann-Margret.
The second two discs spotlight the other artists he brought into the factorty, including a young, unknown Gram Parsons. The previously unreleased “Come On Sunshine” by sometime duet partner Suzi Jane Hokom is a nice slice of late-‘60s psychedelic pop. But it also opens with with the line “I want to take these heavy boots off of my feet,” a nod to, and maybe a casting-off of, those earlier boots to show the footprints Hazlewood left on the pop world.
Artist: Mary Lambert
Album: Welcome to the Age of My Body (EP)
Release Date: Dec. 17
Songs: “Body Love,” “She Keeps Me Warm”
Perhaps not since Dido was sampled for Eminem’s “Stan” has a woman singer-songwriter made an impact from a hip-hop cameo as much as Mary Lambert has from Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ equality anthem “Same Love.” The Seattle musician both wrote and sang the key hook that makes up the chorus.
That hook got her a major-label deal and is part of a full song itself, “She Keeps Me Warm,” a proud declaration of her own “same” love, which is featured on the upcoming EP “Welcome to the Age of My Body.” Not long ago this would have been relegated to the “women’s music” category, or else she would have needed to remain coy and unspecific in gender references, as Melissa Etheridge did in her early career.
A breakthrough? Very much. But also, simply, a good song and terrific singer. There’s more going on here, though, evidenced in the two-part “Body Love,” which opens and closes this short release, seeing her go into character as a young woman battling societal body image. Between this and Lorde’s detached materialism critique it’s great to see young women not just with something important to say, but effectively artistic ways of saying it.
States race for a piece of the billion-dollar Boeing 777X project
Today is the deadline for cities to submit proposals to build the new Boeing 777X airliner on their turf. More than a dozen sites have been chosen as the potential recipient for the billion-dollar contract.
Boeing opened up the bidding process after failing to reach an agreement on an 8-year contract with a union over healthcare costs and its pension plan. To help explain what this contract means to cities across the country, we welcome in Carolyn Adolph, economics reporter at KUOW in Seattle.
Also with us is Marshall Griffin, the statehouse reporter for St. Louis Public Radio joining us from Jefferson City, Missouri, and KPCC business and economics reporter Brian Watt.
Why is Antarctica's Totten Glacier shrinking faster than its neighbors?
For years, climate scientists have watched with concern as an ice sheet in Western Antarctica has steadily decreased in mass. Recently more attention is being paid to the Eastern side of the continent at the bottom of the world.
A new study from scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena finds some glaciers there are also shrinking, and one in particular is melting much faster than others around it.
From the KPCC Science Desk, Sanden Totten has more.
Downey: A new kind of suburban idyll
Neighborhoods across Southern California are being reshaped by the adult children of immigrants. KPCC's Leslie Berestein Rojas reports on the Latino experience within one storied Los Angeles suburb.
General Motors' first female chief executive shatters glass ceiling
General Motors, the nation's largest automaker, has announced that Mary Barra will replace retiring Daniel Akerson as the company's chief executive. She will be the first woman to lead a major auto company.
The decision was announced a day after the U.S. Treasury sold its remaining GM shares, ending any government involvement in the company.
RELATED: From shop to floor: New GM head Mary Barra
“This is not a breaking of the glass ceiling, it’s a shattering,” Jean Jennings, president and editor-in-chief of Automobile Magazine, told Take Two. “The entire automotive industry is run by men.”
NPR noted 1 in 5 workers in the auto industry is a woman, and a mere 4 percent of CEOs at all major U.S. companies are female.
Barra has been with GM 30 years, working up the ranks from her very first job at a plant in Pontiac with her late father, according to NPR.
“We have a woman who when she got her big job and they asked her what her goal was she said, ‘No more crappy cars,’” Jennings told Take Two. “Her exact words.”
Since early 2011, Barra has led GM's vehicle-development operations. During that time, NPR reported, GM's Chevrolet Impala became the first U.S. sedan in at least two decades to be chosen by Consumer Reports as the best on the market. Also, Motor Trend picked the Cadillac CTS as car of the year.
Listen to more of Take Two’s interview with Jennings in the audio section to the left.
How to get your kids to love the movies you do
Winter break is quickly approaching, and one option many parents have to keep their kids preoccupied is taking them to the movies.
But sometimes picking out which movies are appropriate for your kids isn't so easy. When it comes to introducing your kids to holiday movies, maybe you think you're safe by showing them one of your personal favorites.
Shawn Levy, critic for The Oregonian, explains how he found ways to make his kids develop the same taste he has.
'Sons of Anarchy' finale: Creator Kurt Sutter catches us up and looks ahead
"Sons of Anarchy" airs its season-six finale on FX tonight, bringing to a culmination a season in which (SPOILER ALERT!) MC President Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam) has to deal with the betrayal of his wife, the loss of his kids, the wrath of the Irish and uncertainty about the future of his club.
Series creator Kurt Sutter joins Take Two to reflect on how far the show has come, the importance it's had in his life and the real outlaws that he deals with all of the time in an effort to keep the show as accurate as possible. He also hints at a possible "Sons" prequel.
Before the success of "Sons of Anarchy," Sutter wrote on another critically acclaimed show, "The Shield." It was a cop drama that helped shape the TV landscape and change the game for FX, and was one of the first dark cable dramas that appeared in what some critics have called the "golden age of television."
Interview Highlights:
On his first gig as a TV writer for "The Shield":
"I came onto that show really with no experience as a TV writer and was just very lucky. Sean Ryan, who created that show, it was sort of his first show-running gig. It was the network's first drama. It was really one of the first dramas that was in that tone that was on basic cable. I always say that it was every disturbing f--ed up pitch I had featured in the feature world, where studio executives just wanted to call security on me, I was able to use on 'The Shield.'"
On how he researched the outlaw lifestyle:
"The interesting thing about that outlaw lifestyle is that it's very much under the radar. It's not a very easy world to gain access to. One of my fellow executive producers who came to me with the initial idea for this, John Linson, had a lot of friends in the life, and I got to spend time with them and see where they hold their meetings, see the kind of bikes they ride, understand what their lifestyle really was. They all had day jobs — mechanics and tattoo artists and house painters — and they all had the thing to survive, and there is a component of it where you see the simplicity of how they live, and how they are just guys trying to pay mortgages and send their kids to school and maintain their family and all the things that, I think, perhaps people didn't necessarily associate with a motorcycle club before that."
On the feedback he's received from people in motorcycle clubs:
"The response was pretty positive. Most of the guys I knew in the world dug the show. They totally got that it was sort of over-the-top. They refer to it as a soap opera, but it was their soap opera. They took ownership of it, and it will be interesting where that point of view goes as the show gets darker and our hero starts to question more about the living within the confines of that world, and it's interesting to watch the perception of it change a little bit, not just with the general viewing audience, but with the outlaw club."
On the graphic violence depicted in the show:
"I don't really have a stance on it. I don't mean to sound irresponsible like I don't care or I don't pay attention because of course I do, but ultimately I'm a storyteller. And these are the kind of stories I like to tell. I always refer to the violence in my show as being pulp, and there's an absurd quality to our violence on our show that I think I consciously do, I think sometimes to the sugaring of some critics and stuff. But it's important for me to keep that level of absurdity within the show to give people a little bit of distance between what's real and what's not real. We had the school shooting that happened in the premiere of this episode, and I try to get in front of that a little bit and let people know that it wasn't me being sensational. That I really wanted to tell that story for the last couple of years, that it would almost be irresponsible for me not to suggest that these guys that deal guns for a living, that ultimately those guns couldn't end up in the hands of an innocent and create that kind of circumstance."
On killing off a key character:
"Some people are easier to get rid of than other people, but it's hard, because we are a big dysfunctional family here, and everyone has gotten really close. Creatively, what we did with Opie was the right choice. Ryan Hurst played that character with such pathos and such depth. We felt the depth of his pain and his despair, and I just felt like there were not a lot of place we could go with him after that, after we damaged him so badly. We did such horrible things to his family, and I just didn't see how he could sit across the table from Clay and any of those guys again."
On what happened on the set the day they killed off Opie:
"It was deep. I wasn't there on the set, but I know that Ryan requested that the guys sort of all be on the other side of that glass when he died. He was very close to Charlie and all those guys. It was really emotional. And then there's a thing, actually on YouTube, where we see them shave off the beard, his beard, to sort of put the memory to rest. Then we do a dinner. You get the dead character dinner, where we rent the room, and it is essentially a wake of sorts."
On why audiences love these outlaws:
"I think the key is really being able to write characters that are damaged enough and vulnerable enough where you at least can get a sense of their struggle or their sense or remorse. With Jax, it's always been about his struggle in terms of wanting to be a good guy and wanting to do the right thing by his club and by his family. And he is really driven by that credo and, yes, he does a lot of nefarious things to expedite that agenda, but that is really his agenda, and I think that's what people tie into."
On what's next for him:
"I try to keep my foot in the feature world, so I'll probably continue to work on some feature projects, but I love TV. We have been having discussions about a potential prequel to the show, which right now are just discussions, but there's some excitement about taking a look at the origins of the club and the First Nine, and we probably wouldn't necessarily dovetail that right after the end of the show. We would probably let the mythology sit and breathe for a minute or two before we did that."