Protestors poised for Trump's border visit, LA Times' Christopher Hawthorne joins city of LA, UCLA opens Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families
Trump protesters and advocates assemble in San Diego
In anticipation of President Trump's visit to San Diego, demonstrators gathered to show support for the proposed border wall while others assembled in protest.
President Trump landed at the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station in San Diego this morning and then headed to the U.S.–Mexico border to inspect prototypes for the controversial border wall.
Supporters gathered near the prototype site, while those protesting President Trump's immigration policies were at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. Protests also took place yesterday in San Diego; messaging at those events focused on the myriad reasons that a border wall is a bad idea, according to KPBS reporter Jean Guerrero.
The people who I spoke with yesterday had a similar message ... saying that the border wall is a symbol of hate, that it promotes racism against immigrants, that it is needlessly expensive and that it is ineffective because ... the existing border infrastructure that we have, about 600 miles along the 2000-mile border, has essentially rerouted a lot of the traffic, a lot of the illegal immigration and smuggling that we saw through cities was was pushed to the desert, into the ocean, particularly in areas like Arizona ... hundreds of people dying each year.
Meanwhile, Trump supporters at the wall prototype inspection site brought a different take.
They want to welcome Trump. ... They are called the San Diego Minutemen, they formed this group that used to patrol the border to stop people from coming through illegally. ... They still very much advocate against illegal immigration.
The two demonstrations planned for today were initially intended to take place near each other, at the wall protoypes, but concerns about conflicts between the groups led to their separation. Security at the San Ysidro site is minimal, but San Diego police was be prepared to keep the peace at the wall prototype site.
San Diego Sheriffs are banning bear spray at Trump's visit
In anticipation of Tuesday's protests, the San Diego County Sheriff's Department has banned certain items from the areas President Trump is visiting. There are 25 items on the list, including the usual suspects -- firearms, knives, axes, tasers, baseball bats, mace.
But one thing in particular caught our eye: bear spray. We wanted to learn more about what that is, so we reached out to Mike Davis. He's co-owner of the website, pepper-spray-store.com.
Davis says bear spray has the same active ingredient as pepper spray, but in a lower concentration. Both are made from chemicals in extremely hot peppers.
As its name indicates, bear spray is meant to be used against bears.
If anybody gets hit with pepper spray, it hits the mucus membranes. Everything swells up, and it feels very difficult to breath, and everything swells shut. That's enough to make a bear not want to continue to chase you.
Bear spray is usually formulated to spray longer distances than other pepper sprays, Davis says, sometimes as far as 20 feet.
Someone doesn't have to get extremely close in order to cause a lot of problems. If you can be 20 feet away from the stage or 20 feet away from where someone is presenting, they don't have to get in real close.
Another reason bear spray can cause trouble: Davis says it can be made in large canisters so it can be used to hurt more people.
California puts size limits on pepper sprays because they're meant to be used for self defense against people, but animal sprays aren't restricted.
UC President Janet Napolitano wants to streamline transfers for community college students
The University of California Board of Regents is meeting Tuesday at UCLA. One of the topics that could come up for discussion is the process for community college students transferring to UC schools.
Last week, UC President Janet Napolitano said she hopes to change the way the transfer process works so all community college students who meet certain grade point and class requirements would be guaranteed admission to a UC school.
Napolitano said the UC system is close to guaranteed admissions for transfers now, but this is an important step to finish that work.
Our aim is to have one community college student for every two true freshman and that they enter the university prepared for upper division work so they can graduate in two years. That's what the guarantee is all about.
The changes aren't set in stone, but Napolitano said the new transfer process is likely to be based on current Transfer Pathways, which are sets of classes community college students can take that UC schools accept for credit.
Right now, Transfer Pathways only guarantee a student is eligible to apply for a UC, but that's what Napolitano hopes to change.
This [change] is that you'd actually be guaranteed a seat, and we hope by having a guarantee, that that will incentivize more community college students to take a Transfer Pathway and really pursue their Bachelor's degree at the university.
The UC system feels confident that it has the capacity to support the increased number of transfer students that could result from this change, Napolitano said, but they will have to look closely at whether or not more resources could be needed.
Increasing the four-year graduation rate is another big goal for the UC system, which would make room for thousands more students to make their way through the institution. Right now the four-year graduation rate is around 64%, Napolitano said, and the goal is to raise that to 70% by 2030.
The new transfer process still requires more approvals, but when Napolitano announced her plans in a San Fransisco speech last week, she said she hopes to have the changes in place by fall of 2019.
(Note: A previous version of this story misstated that the UC system wanted one community college transfer for every true freshman, not every two true freshman. It has since been corrected.)
Congressman Duncan Hunter anticipates meeting with President
President Donald Trump visited San Diego today. Planning to join him was Republican Duncan Hunter, U.S. Representative for California’s 50th District, who accepted an invitation to meet with President Trump at the site where the President planned to inspect prototypes for a controversial proposed border wall.
Hunter spoke with Take Two a few hours before his planned meeting with the President, noting the substantial overlap between his politics and those of Mr. Trump:
A lot of my constituency see me ... and Trump on the same page on a lot of these issues, because we are. I don't have to make myself fit into the Trump Doctrine. That's the way that I live life. So I'm happy with what Trump's doing. I'm even happy with the steel tariffs, I'm happy with him protecting American jobs, fighting against the Russians and the Chinese dumping steel in our markets.
Hunter also talked about national security, relations between San Diego and Mexico, an FBI investigation into Hunter's alleged misuse of campaign funds and whether an association with the President may affect Hunter's reelection chances.
For more coverage of President Trump's visit to California, visit KPCC's Live Updates page.
Meet LA's first chief design officer
Christopher Hawthorne has long been the architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times. But on Monday, he announced he'll be leaving the paper to take on a new role. Starting next month, Hawthorne will be L.A.'s first chief design officer. Mayor Eric Garcetti personally tapped him for the job.
Christopher Hawthorne joined Take Two to talk about his new position navigating L.A. toward its post-suburban future.
The Chief Designer Officer job, explained
It’s a big city, so there's a lot to think about in terms of design and architecture. In certain ways the job will resemble other chief jobs in Mayor Garcetti’s administration -- thinking across several departments in coordination with other agencies about these issues. In my case, it’s thinking about the public realm chiefly, so civic architeicture in terms of public space. L.A. is really investing in the public realm in new ways with transit, housing, parks. There’s a lot of money already in hand or approved by voters. My job more than anything will be thinking how to bring a unified vision to spend that money most efficiently.
How the upcoming Olympics might affect L.A. design
The design of the '84 Olympics, that scaffolding and color scheme, all those things epitomized L.A. and the character and optimism of L.A. in the ‘80s. I look to that as a model all the time as a design that was really efficient and pragmatic at the time … I look at that as a quintessential L.A. design: exuberance, optimism and multiculturalism but also that deadline, having the Olympics be 10 years away, that was one of the reasons I was attractd to the job.
How much of L.A. could be changed by the 2028 Olympics
Mayor Garceti is one of the main reasons I took the job. He is genuinely interested and knowledgeable about these issues. He cares about them a lot and knows something about therm. There’s the 10-year deadline for the Olympics and his second term -- he has a 5-1/2-year second term -- so there are a couple deadlines there to think about what we can do. It’s a wide canvas. We have to be thinking of different time frames. The homeless and housing crisis, we have to move immediately on that front. Other things will be medium and longer term, but 10 years is long enough to think about getting things executed in time for LA showing itself to the world.
L.A. is undergoing a major transformation
L.A., like a lot of cities post war, invested in the private realm -- the freeways, single-family houses and a kind of suburban idea of L.A. at this giant metropolitan scale. We've run out of room to sprawl at the edges, and we need to retrofit some spaces that were closed off to public access. The L.A. River is the clearest example. Not only did we channelize the river to prevent flooding but closed off the river as a public entity… We’re trying to retrofit a space like that so it fulfills flood control responsibilities but also reopen it to public access in a city that has been really park poor. We have great public spaces here, but they’re largely along the periphery, the beaches, Griffith Park. They’re not accessible to large parts of the city.
UCLA launches center for disadvantaged youths
West LA VA considers car camping as an 'urgency' measure to house veterans
Famous fam: These LA artists have deep musical roots
Every week, Take Two's music reviewers give us a taste of what's new in our weekly segment, Tuesday Reviewsday. This week, Steve Hochman shares songs by LA artists who are no strangers to the music biz.
Artist: Leah James
Album: “While She Sleeps”
Songs: “That Fateful Day,” “The Desert”
Release date: March 30
Leah James is pretty accustomed to the tabloid tumult. Her father Don Felder co-founded the Eagles and maintained an uneasy relationship with bandmates before (and after) being fired from the reunited group in the early 2000s when his daughter was but a child. Even more so, she’s married to Brandon Jenner, son of Caitlyn Jenner, making her part of the Kardashian clan and all that entails.
Perhaps the dreamy, atmospheric calm of her debut solo album could be seen as a reaction to (or oasis from) the celebrity family whirlwinds. And more so for her, than for her new daughter, Eva, she titled the album, “While She Sleeps.”
On the one hand, the album was inspired by Eva’s arrival and James’ new role as a mother. On the other hand, the making of it, some of which took place during respites from motherhood that the title denotes, provided some healthy “me time” for the new mommy, who ensconced herself for writing sessions in a yurt in the yard of her L.A. home. (Hey, we’ve got yacht rock, why not yurt rock?)
It projects wishes for her daughter’s life to come. The songs here, she has said, explore family, femininity, and independence — “an album that both supports and encourages women with every word.” But for that sweeping intent, the key to the music is intimacy, a mix of sweetness and concern for her young’ un.
The two swirl together in the opening song, “That Fateful Day,” as in life, her caressing vocal surrounded by acoustic guitar, dramatic strings, pulsing electronics and a trumpet (from Tower of Power’s Bill Churchville) straight out of an Ennio Morricone spaghetti western score. “You carried me home,” she sings, as if the roles are reversed, the child bringing the mother to a place of belonging.
Variations on that mix follow: “Love Me With Madness” tilting more to the sweet, but still tinged with emotional precariousness. “My Love Will Follow” couches its promise with wistful melancholy. “The Desert” alternates from spare verses to lush choruses with echoes of Roy Orbison and Phil Spector, via Kate Bush or Mazzy Star, whose dreamy SoCal space-country she at times evokes — the arid plains of the titular landscape conjured with help from such friends as Greg Leisz on haunting steel guitar and James' husband (with whom she has previously recorded some under the duo name Brandon & Leah) on various instruments.
Expansive nature references abound throughout — “Wildfire,” “New Moon,” “Big Sur.” But James, purposefully not using her dad’s last name or her husband’s, but going with something just hers, creates her own sonic shelter at once safe in its solitude and invitingly cozy. Like a yurt. Or a mother’s feelings for her child.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00WXhbmD5OU
Artist: Joachim Cooder
Album: “Fuchsia Machu Pichu”
Songs: “Gaviota Drive,” “Fuchsia Machu Picchu”
Release date: March 30
There's a lot in common between this and Leah James’ album. Joachim Cooder, too, is the child of a Los Angeles musical icon, guitarist/composer/ethnomusicologist Ry Cooder. And family, including a new child, figures heavily in this, Joachim’s first solo album. On the lovely, sentimental “Gaviota Drive,” accompanied by his dad as well as his wife, singer Juliette Commagere, and her husband Robert Francis, the younger Cooder sings musings inspired by holding his then-infant child in the quiet of his mother-in-law’s Laguna Beach home as the sun rose. And the title song “Fuchsia Machu Picchu,” opening the album, is an ode to the first vegetation he planted when he and Commagere moved into their Highland Park home a few years ago.
“Fuchsia Machu Picchu, when will you come and set down roots,” he sings in a conversational tone over the tinkling bell-like sounds of custom-made mbira, the “thumb piano” that’s core to much West and Central African music. “Cause it’s hot in this city, tonight’s a supermoon.”
The music reflects that, with an earthy-cosmic blend of elliptical rhythms and his elastically conversational voice. The distinctive core sonic motif is the shimmering bell-like sounds of Cooder’s electronics-enhanced version of a mbira, the African “thumb piano,” custom-made by the San Diego-based Array instruments firm. The sound perfectly captures and personalizes the influences of an extended musical family, such vaunted figures as the Cuban legends who made up the Buena Vista Social Club and the late Malian guitar god Ali Farka Touré, with whom he worked starting in his youth alongside his father as a percussionist and, later, co-producer. One member of that extended family, Vieux Farka Touré, son of Ali Farka, adds guitar to the floating, equatorial “Because the Moonlight.” It’s a perfect touch on an album of songs that embrace the whole of the world while focusing on the most intimate moments of life.
Artist: NoMBe
Album: “They Might’ve Even Loved Me”
Songs: “Freak Like Me,” “Can’t Catch Me”
Release date: March 23
Continuing with the family theme, and famous family at that, Noah McBeth has one of R&B’s greats as his godmother: Chaka Khan. Under the performing name NoMBe — pronounced Gnome-bay — he celebrates her influence here in his debut album with a wide-ranging set of soul-rock-funk-psychedelic nuggets. Not that it sounds like Khan, but it shows her impact in terms of the command, confidence and reach she has shown throughout her career. As such, she’s something of the godmother not just of the artist, but of the album.
Each of the songs on “They Might’ve Even Loved Me” is inspired by one of the powerful women who has had an impact on him through his life — family, friends, lovers and all. Fittingly, he took a diary approach to the release of the music, one song a month sent out digitally over the course of the last year. Along the way the songs caught the ears of such figures as Pharrell Williams and, bringing it all full circle, Kylie Jenner, who championed his work on social and other media — Williams picked the frisky rocker “Can’t Catch Me” for the theme of his HBO documentary series “Outpost.”
Now a dozen songs, plus three more, have been put together as this album, and if we don’t know the stories behind each song, perhaps, the whole tells the story of an artist on his own path. He took his own path, born and raised in Germany, and first coming to the U.S. in 2010 when a school theater class made a trip to Las Vegas for a performance. Now 26, he’s made his home in L.A. and is set to hone his musical skills.
There’s no one sound with which to identify him. Each song, presumably like each inspiring woman, has its own character. Opener “Wait” rides a bouncy pulse. “Sex” is sultry, seductive modern soul (preceded by an intro poem). “Rocky Horror” is, contrary to the title, a sweet acoustic ode dedicated to his mother— he says he wrote it without having seen the movie but only having read a summary. “Summer’s Gone” is hazy rap-pop (in a Sublime mode) to a love that ended with the season. Comparisons are hard to make, though certainly, Prince was a big influence on his range and studio obsessions. The swampy funk of “Freak Like Me” is particularly Prince-ly, both in the suggestiveness and the fuzzed guitar lines. And now he’s taking the music out of the studio, having assembled a band of three young women (also as Prince did with his 3RDEYEGIRL combo) to bring the songs to life.