A tentative agreement has been reached in the Mexico farm worker strike, an update on LAPD body cameras, why parents should encourage girls to like pink.
San Quintin produce pickers return to work amid strike
For the past two weeks, produce pickers in the agricultural town of San Quintin have been protesting low wages and inaccessable healthcare. Many of the fruits and vegetables picked there end up on dinner tables across the U.S.
The strike took thousands of workers off the fields and cost growers tens of millions of dollars in lost produce. The workers were pushing for a 300-peso raise--that’s about $13. Now many workers have returned to the fields, but UFW (United Farm Workers) vice president Erik Nicholson says it’s not because they were victorious; things were starting to get dire for everyone involved in the negotiations.
“It’s been very difficult for everybody. Workers who make six or seven dollars a day have no income. Growers who depend on these workers who harvest these crops have not been able to sell their produce. And retailers who depend on selling this produce to us have not had the materials they need to make a profit. “
The worker’s demands come as a result of a recent economic downturn in Mexico--a downturn that resulted in inflation. Late last week, growers started offering 15% raises to any pickers who would return to work immediately. Nicholson says that this offer won’t really solve the problem, though.
“In the last three months, workers have lost about 20% of the buying power of their wages--and this is the result of the devaluation of the Peso. They are 20% poorer now than they were three months ago. So when the grower community has put a 15% increase on the table, what that really means is that workers would be 5% poorer than they would have been three months ago.”
The new incentive further thinned the ranks of protesters, likely limiting their bargaining power going forward.
So where do the impoverished pickers go from here? Nicholson says American consumers have the power to change the Mexican agriculture industry.
“Who actually has the final say is you and I here, who consume those final products. When you open that clamshell and take out a strawberry to eat, it hasn’t been washed. It hasn’t been processed. The last hands to touched that strawberry were likely of an indigenous worker who may not have housing, who may not have access to water or sanitation.”
He says representative groups are now working to put pressure on the Mexican government and bring more regulation to the agricultural industry.
LA Police Commission to hear body cam report
The Los Angeles Police Commission takes up the red-hot topic of body cameras for LAPD officers at its meeting Tuesday.
They'll hear a report on how far along the department is on outfitting cops with cameras, and the costs of doing so. Southern California Public Radio's Frank Stoltze joins the show for an update.
When public shaming is on the Internet, it can get brutal
When you messed up nearly 200 years ago, you were publicly shamed with a stay in stocks and pillories.
Eventually we decided public humiliation was uncivilized, and the practice was phased out.
Now, shaming is back in a big way, thanks in no small part to the Internet.
It's a fascinating and frightening trend tackled by Jon Ronson in "So You've Been Publicly Shamed."
Ronson will read at Skylight Books in Los Feliz on Monday, April 6th at 7:30p
Tuesday Reviewsday: New music from Sufjan Stevens, Laura Marlin, Lila Downs and more
This week on Tuesday Reviewsday, our weekly new music segment, A Martinez is joined in the studio by music journalists
and
.
Chris Martins
Artist: Sufjan Stevens
Album: "Carrie & Lowell"
Songs: "Fourth of July," "Should Have Known Better"
Notes: The elusive, Detroit raised, Sufjan Stevens returns, banjo in tow. It's been five years since the man's last proper album, and even that was a departure. 2010's "The Age of Adz" was a loud and ambitious electronic album. He'd said that he was tired of making indie-folk at the time. He also left behind the cutesy concepts of his early records, like the state-themed Michigan and Illinois.
What's great about the new album is it marks a return to his core sound, which is to say: lightly picked acoustics and taut atmosphere. But it retains the personal bent of the last record. I mean, it's even named after Sufjans' mother and stepfather, Carrie & Lowell. You get the sort of detailed storytelling prowess and conflicted exploration of faith that you might hear on a Mountain Goats album, but with the intimacy and hush of Simon & Garfunkel or Bon Iver.
Artist: Laura Marling
Album: "Short Movie"
Songs: "False Hope," "Walk Alone"
Notes: I wanna highlight an album that might've been overshadowed last week by the arrival of Courtney Barnett. English artist Laura Marling is another import who does Americana very well, and very differently. She's more folksy, but on "Short Movie," her new album, she plugs in. It's the first time she has gone electric.
Marling is excellent at infusing angst into acoustic strum, and she does that here too. But even those songs sound more agitated than her last album, "Once I Was an Eagle." That was a record about breaking up with a boy, Marcus Mumford, actually. This one is about breaking up with society, or herself maybe.
She actually left the U.K. and spent two years in Los Angeles after finishing her last album. She taught yoga, read books, wrote poetry and took solo trips to Joshua Tree. She didn't tell the people she met that she even makes music and it seemed like she wasn't so sure about that anymore anyway.
Thankfully, Marling returned from the wilds with 13 more songs. This is the 25-year-old's fifth album in seven years, and it's great: live, loud, a little psychedelic.
Steve Hochman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCd8qo6sjlY&feature=youtu.be
Artist: Lila Downs
Album: "Balas y Chocolate"
Songs: "Balas y Chocolate," "La Patria Madrina"
Notes: Balas y Chocolate — bullets and chocolate? A rather darker twist on the old spoonful of sugar helping the medicine go down, perhaps. But it sums up the conditions of Mexico 2015, in the view of Lila Downs. Downs has long mixed seemingly contrasting images, not to mention musical styles, through 11 albums in a singularly dynamic career. Born in a small town in Oaxaca (where her mother was from), but spending much of her childhood in Minnesota (her father’s home), she celebrates her Mexican origins, but with an expansive worldview and voracious intellect and artistry. She’s long placed village folk songs alongside soaring rock and yearning ballads, put metal next to mariachi, even explored the aesthetic overlaps of Mexican street music with Eastern European Jewish klezmer.
This album No. 12 is what it all led to, a boldly vibrant statement of both her life and her country’s, in which dire tragedy and hopeful determination combine seamlessly and naturally, as do rancheras and metal-edged hip-hop. Balas y chocolate. And, in fact, all of that is in the title track, dedicated "to the children who migrate crossing borders, on the Latin American cacao route," a very perilous journey. But as the song switches styles, it becomes more poetic, more fever-dream metaphor for personal survival through the many bullets of any life’s road, a horrifying yet familiar litany she recites in the course of the song. It’s as powerful as it is compelling. "I’m escaping to chocolate," she sings at one point. "You are my chocolate."
The album’s tone throughout is informed by the political (the abduction and apparent murder of 43 students in the state of Guerrero last year is a major presence here) and the personal (motherhood with her son approaching 5, and darkness with her husband and collaborator Paul Cohen dealing with serious health issues). Día de Los Muertos, the Mexican festivities both honoring and mocking death, is a thread running through the album.
"La Patria Madrina," the first single, is a defiant lament for a Mexico under siege of drug lords and industrialists and a hopeful call for action via cultural and political will, more forceful for the presence of her duet partner, Colombian star Juanes. (Mexico's Juan Gabriel guests on another track.) The title of this song translates as "My Home Country," literally the godmother country. It’s a protest song in the classic sense, wondering what happened to the values of Latin America, “the dreams of Simon Bolivar, Jose Marti, Vicente Guerrero.” Those dreams live in Downs, exuberantly manifest in this album, a range of musics and emotions, complementing and contrasting, in rich harmony — an embodiment of the ideals she holds for her homeland.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq8_dmCO_bw
Artist: The Go! Team
Album: "The Scene Between"
Songs: "Blowtorch," "The Art of Getting By"
Notes: It’s March Madness, so a perfect time for a pep rally — well, one with maybe the Jesus and Mary Chain making the music. That, more or less, is the sound of the Go! Team, the boisterous, cheery spirit of one with the fuzzy, densely layered sonic rush of the other.
The Go! Team emerged from Brighton, England, in the mid-2000s with a ridiculously boisterous sound as for all intents a one-man project of Ian Parton with a few guests. When the debut album Thunder, Lightning, Strike took off in the UK, Parton pieced together a band to perform at clubs and festivals and the Go! Team became a going concern. The shows, including one here at the Troubadour, were giddy affairs, art without pomposity, cheerleading without the pompoms. Never really a full-time band, recordings and performances became sporadic.
Now a decade later, for just the fourth album and first in four years, Parton has gone back to how it started, basically doing everything himself and bringing in a few friends to fill it out. For the most part, that’s five female singers — Doreen Kirchner being the one we heard on "Blowtorch," along with Samira Winter, Casey Sowa, Annabelle Cazes and Shi Lu.
It was a smart move, the sound tight and confident, the melodies at the core, soaring and always smile-inducing. And not empty smiles — the lyrics explore a range of emotions, not all cheery, but always with an underlying optimism fitting with the DIY initiative behind it. As one song title puts it, it’s all about "The Art of Getting By," a point boosted even more by being along with the title track one of two featuring the London African Gospel Choir. The Jesus and Mary Chain taking it to church? Let’s Go!
The Brood: This mom doesn't want her daughter to hate pink
Four years ago, author Peggy Orenstein put out a book called "Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture."
The book explored the phenomenon of "princess culture" and warned parents of the insidious effects of all things pretty and pink.
But have we gone overboard in our disdain?
Los Angeles based writer and mother Amanda Deibert recently tackled the question in an essay for the website xoJane.
Seattle sees 1st phase of minimum wage increase
The minimum wage in Seattle moves up to $11 on Wednesday, the first step in a city-sponsored plan that will bring the minimum up to at least $15. There will be winners, and losers, and they're not always who you might expect.
Deborah Wang of public station KUOW reports in part two of this series. Listen to part one here.
Ancient lobster-like predator points to origins of arthropods
A team of scientists recently named a newly discovered ancient predator from the Mid-Cambrian era, about 500 million years ago. The lobster-like creature was an early arthropod with large frontal appendages it used to hunt and ingest its prey. In a paper published in the journal, Palaeontoly, co-author Robert Gaines, a paleontologist who teaches at Pomona College, called the creature Yawunik kootenayi.
How Jupiter helped form the solar system we know today
The solar system as we know it today may not have been the same if it weren't for one planet: Jupiter.
That's what new research from two scientists at Caltech and UC Santa Cruz suggests.
Konstantin Batygin is one of the scientists behind the study, and is an assistant professor of planetary science at Caltech. He joins host A Martinez with more.
New 'Daily Show' host Trevor Noah faces criticism for tweets
Yesterday, Comedy Central announced its choice to replace Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show."
Thirty-one-year-old comedian Trevor Noah seemed to many to be an interesting pick. He's young, bi-racial, and South African.
Race plays a big role in his edgy humor. But, so does religion, gender and weight, in ways that many have found offensive.
Tweets made by Noah over the past few years have started to surface, and the reaction has not been entirely kind.
of the New York Times joined Take Two with the latest on the controversy.
'Rad American Women A to Z' celebrates females who shaped the world
Tuesday is the last day of Women's History Month.
There's still a little still time to learn about some of the fantastic females who have helped shape our world, and there's a really fun way to do so with your kids.
The new book "Rad American Women A to Z" profiles 26 amazing women, including many familiar names like Angela Davis, Billie Jean King and Carol Burnett. But, there are also a few you may not have heard of before.
Kate Schatz is the book's author, and she joins the show.
You can also catch a reading with Schatz Tuesday night at the Hammer Museum.