Gov. Brown's plan to work with the Community College System to make advanced learning more accessible, CA's antiquarian book fair, your weekend preview.
What happens to Sacramento's #MeToo movement after Garcia accusations?
Today on State of Affairs:
- Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia has been at the forefront of Sacramento's #MeToo movement. But she now faces new allegations of sexual misconduct.
- Four-inch heels, eight-hour speech. What's next for Nancy Pelosi in the fight for DACA?
- The Public Policy Institute has some new numbers on the California governor's race — and a familiar face from L.A. has closed in on once-front-runner Gavin Newsom.
Cal State L.A.'s Raphael Sonenshein on how the recent allegations against Cristina Garcia could affect the #MeToo movement in Sacramento:
I don't think it affects the momentum; I think it gets the point across that this is about the misuse of power.
This should not only be about men, although, honestly, the overwhelming evidence is that the great share of this misconduct is by men against women.
It certainly is eye opening. It just shows how complicated this is getting. This has come upon us as a society rather quickly, even though the issue has been around forever. It's going off in unforeseeable and unforeseen directions.
Christina Bellantoni, LA Times: I think the transparency is very important. For years, we had no way of knowing what allegations had been made, what settlements had been filed with taxpayer money, what investigations had been launched with taxpayer money, and the L.A. Times sort of made some legal threats to get more documents than the legislature was providing and last week they actually gave us a giant document.
You can read the actual cases. It's really important for the state to know that.
These 5 bills before California lawmakers seek to expand health coverage, lower costs
Proposed new online community college faces skepticism
Earlier this year, Governor Jerry Brown included funding in his preliminary budget for a fully online public college to make advanced learning, and better jobs, more accessible to all Californians. In particular, Brown is hoping to reach the 2.5 million Californians who have high school diplomas but do not have college degrees, according to Felicia Mello of Cal Matters:
... these are really working adults that are looking for credentials to advance their career. And these are folks that [Governor Brown] says are currently not accessing the college system in California and are getting shut out of job opportunities in the job market because they lack credentials.
Brown aims to partner with the California Community Colleges System to develop this new online college. The school would focus on training workers for various high-demand industries, including "healthcare, childcare, advanced manufacturing and information technology," according to Mello.
The Governor seeks $100 million to design the curriculum plus an annual operating budget of $20 million. But even if the new college is funded, it faces various hurdles. Mello spoke with a professor from College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita who teaches early childhood education. The professor identified a practical issue:
And she said "You know, some things are really easy to teach online, like the types of theory classes that deal with child development. But when you're taking about something like 'how do you change an infant's diaper?' that's something that's really difficult to teach, or even assess, exclusively online.
The proposal for an online college has also met with resistance from existing colleges in California, which already offer online courses. Concerns about unequal access to technology have also been raised.
Snag a piece of SoCal history at the antiquarian book fair
Looking for an early printing of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"? Maybe a first edition of an F. Scott Fitzgerald classic or a sketchbook that provides a window into early Los Angeles?
If books with backstories are your thing, you're in luck. The California International Antiquarian Book Fair comes to the Pasadena Convention Center this weekend.
Here are some of the local treasures you'll find:
Pen Sketches of Los Angeles (1896)
- Owner: Michael Dawson, Dawson's Book Shop, Echo Park
- Price: $4,000
Michael Dawson: The thing that is so interesting about this book and makes it so unique is that it shows streets block by block. When they were doing these whole blocks, they would show every single business in every building. There are other pictorial publications related to Los Angeles at this time, but there is none that has this detailed business view.
Michael Dawson: They would have been made for businesses. It would be paid for by all these ads that the people placed in there. There would be a salesman who would walk through the area and say, "We're doing this fancy book about Los Angeles. Wouldn't you like to be involved? For minimal cost, we'll make sure that the name of your business appears... The guy down the street, he's doing it."
LAPD Log (1925)
- Owner: Jennifer and Brad Johnson, Johson Rare Books & Archives, Covina, CA
- Price: $2,500
Jennifer Johnson: It's bound like a book, but it's not a traditional book. These particular officers were logging every single day what they were doing for work. They happened to be working the secondhand shops unit. One of the things that I found most fascinating is they would even investigate stolen suits. But clothing during that era was so much more expensive, so you can see why they would investigate those types of things.
Austin Cross: I want to look at something here from the 29th of December, 1925. It says: "Went to pool hall at 7th and Gladys in the afternoon and also at 6 p.m. looking for Manuel Navaro, who escaped from Lincoln Heights Jail." How do you come across something like this?
Jennifer Johnson: Often, things like this are collected by people throughout history. This item came from a gentleman who collected a lot of Los Angeles history. He put it away in a storage locker, and it sat there for about 40 years. He decided to downsize, he gave us a call, we came out, and we purchased this amongst a lot of other stuff. People become caretakers of this kind of historic information. We help move it along.
Brad Johnson: It's the sort of thing that has so many data points. That's our role as antiquarian booksellers. We attempt to find things like this, interpret them, discuss their importance, and get them in the hands of the scholar or the collector who's going to make use of this and add to our understanding of our own history.
See the slideshow for more photos.
(Answers have been edited for clarity.)
US Olympic figure skating team has a big dose of California talent
The opening ceremony for the 2018 Winter Olympic Games was Friday. California will be well represented on Team USA, particularly on the ice rink.
Five members of the figure skating team -- Karen Chen, Mirai Nagasu, Nathan Chen, Adam Rippon and Vincent Zhou -- are from the Golden State.
Rippon and Nathan Chen both train at The Rinks in Lakewood, a SoCal facility that has become a destination for top skating talent. Rippon said training alongside his teammate Nathan Chen has helped him keep his focus while preparing for the games.
"Training with Nathan has been a little bit of my own secret weapon because I've really seen him come up, and I've seen the hard work he puts in and it motivates me to do the same."
Getting ready for the Olympics is, of course, a huge challenge, but these skaters have their families, friends and mentors to help them. Karen Chen turned to her skating idol and fellow SoCal native, Kristi Yamaguchi, for some advice before she left for the games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
The Broad mounts a massive Jasper Johns exhibit
The man who may be America’s greatest living artist is having his first LA show in more than 50 years, in “Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth,” which opens Saturday at The Broad museum in downtown LA.
Johns, who turns 88 in May, was discovered by New York gallery owner Leo Castelli approximately 60 years ago. Since then, he's become famous for painting blazing targets, assertive single-digit numbers and, especially, American flags. Those works now sell for tens of millions of dollars.
He once told an interviewer he doesn’t “fully understand” that part of the art business. "When it begins," he said, "You’re pleased that you can make something and sell it. It allows you to do the work that you want to do. As the value increases, you see that society takes over in the value and meaning of the work.
But Johns says, “The meaning may just be that the painting exists.” His flags and targets augured the coming of Pop Art, but he more identified with the 1920s Da Da movement and chief Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, whose work taught him to disregard artistic formality and convention. He once said, "At times I will attempt to do something which seems quite uncalled for in the painting, so that the work won’t proceed so logically from where it is but will go somewhere else."
Johns hung with dancer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage, men at the razor’s edge of the late ‘50s avant garde, and his work evolved into sculpture and lithography, acquiring influences from painters as various as Picasso and Grunewald, yet continued to evoke real, primal themes like targets and flags, the lonely years of his Carolina childhood, and his losses and disappointments.
"I like what I see to be real or to be my idea of what is real, and I think I have a kind of resentment against illusion when I can recognize it." -- Jasper Johns
The new show at the Broad, titled “Something Resembling Truth,” gives us 127 of Johns’ creative “realities,” some of which have never traveled before. The exhibit, which includes 7 pieces from the Broad collection, is pointedly not a chronological retrospective, but a themed survey. That might be a problem for you if you’re trying to figure out how Johns evolved. And – at least for me – 127 works was too much to take in on my 90-minute visit. At $25 a ticket, that might also be a problem for many viewers. (Just to clarify, The Broad is not imposing a time limit for visitors.)
There’s an entire gallery of his famous flags – some with 48 stars because he started them before Alaska and Hawaii were states. Johns says the flag first occurred to him in a dream: when he awoke, he was so obsessed with the image that he painted the spectral Old Glory on his sheets. The many flag paintings since then — in different sizes, shapes, color and textures -- tend to arouse your mind simply by asking it “why.” So do the targets, in their disparate colors.
As his career advanced, Johns moved beyond shape, color and stimulus, but never settled into representation ... which doesn’t mean he eschews any narrative. In the 1980s, he painted “Four Seasons,” big canvases wherein a ghostlike representation of what might be Johns’ own shadow (below) flits through Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring. The pictures contain many of Johns’ personal symbols. Winter has a child’s blackboard drawing of a snowman. Spring rains down on its entire picture, including the shadow man.
What does it mean? Famously, he won’t say. But sometimes, it’s apparent. A painting called “In Memory of my feelings,” with a gloomy finish and pathetically dangling fork and spoon, evokes Johns’ sorrow over the loss of his longtime lover Robert Rauschenberg. Like over 10 dozen works elsewhere in the Broad galleries, it cements Johns’ reputation as an American icon as powerful as that flag itself.
Marc Haefele is KPCC's Culture Correspondent. He reviewed "Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth," at The Broad museum in downtown LA. It opens Saturday and runs through May 13, 2018. Tickets are $25 and timed reservations are required. The exhibit is a collaboration with the Royal Academy, London.