LA transit officials find $43.6 million in fund that 'fell through the cracks'; Bratton group pinpoints problems with Oakland's police force; Los Angeles fails to foster diversity for city contract deals; 'The Source Family' looks back at radical utopian living in 1970s Los Angeles; A look ahead to the 2013 TV/Digital Upfronts; Friday Flashback, and more.
LA transit officials find $43.6 million in fund that 'fell through the cracks'
You know that small but oddly large thrill that comes when you find an extra fiver in your jacket pocket that you forgot was there? Well, the city of LA just found a tad more than that in a department of transportation fund.
$43.6 million dollars, actually. It had been piling up — apparently unnoticed — for 17 years.
The millions are a welcome find in a time of economic tightening but now officials are wondering if more funds are languishing elsewhere.
Laura Nelson, transportation reporter for the LA Times, joins the show to explain.
Bratton group pinpoints problems with Oakland's police force
Back in January, Oakland's City Council voted to to hire former LA police Chief Bill Bratton to help bring down rising rates of burglary and homicide. Last year, there were 131 recorded homicides in Oakland and the city averaged 12 robberies and 33 burglaries a day.
Yesterday, Bratton's consulting group released its initial report. Bratton joins the show to fill us in on what the report found.
Read the full report:
Bratton LLC's report on Oakland
Friday Flashback: Immigration bill, Benghazi, and more
We talk about the week that was with our regular journalists in-the-know. On tap this week are Shane Goldmacher, congressional correspondent for the National Journal, and James Rainey from the Los Angeles Times.
A look ahead to the 2013 TV/Digital Upfronts
With TV/Digital Upfronts on the horizon, we thought it'd be a good time to check in now with what's happening in the land of television.
Congress is taking yet another look at the bundling of all those channels on your cable bill, and YouTube rolled out subscription channels. All this a week before we find out which pilots have been picked up and which got the ax.
To help us sort through the business of television, we're joined by Maureen Ryan, TV critic with the Huffington Post
'The Source Family' doc examines radical utopian living in 1970s Los Angeles
The Source Family was a group of about 140 folks who believed in the curative powers of marijuana and alfafa sprouts. They took on names like Isis and Electricity, they practiced mystical sex, and they ran a famous vegetarian restaurant called The Source on Sunset Boulevard.
RELATED: Instant cult classic: 'The Source Family' documentary
The group (mostly made up of women) shared a communal home in the Hollywood House under the leadership of its founder, a man named Jim Baker or Father Yod as he was known.
For years, The Source was one of the most successful restaurants in the city, serving up vegetarian fare to the likes of Goldie Hawn, John Lennon and Marlon Brando. Baker recruited new members at the restaurant, and through a rock band, which Baker fronted.
Now this eclectic group is the subject of a new documentary called "The Source Family":
The Source Family (Trailer) from Eternal Now on Vimeo.
Filmmakers Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos join the show to tell us all about the Source family.
Interview Highlights:
On how Jim Baker wound up becoming a spiritual leader in Los Angeles?
Jodi: "Well in the late '40s Jim had moved to Los Angeles, he actually left a wife and a small child behind, and hopped on an Indian motorcycle to come to LA to audition for the role of Tarzan. Instead he fell in love with a woman named Elaine Baker, and they lived together in Topanga Canyon and he became friends with the bohemian nature boy scene out there. He ultimately started a couple of restaurants with her. These were restaurants that were very well known to the movie stars of the time, producers and also rock stars especially in the later '60s. They totally natural foods, honey sweetened items, which was revolutionary at the time. A lot of young actors would come in at the time and Jim baker would give them tabs and so they became friendly with him and avid customers."
On Jim Baker's philosophies:
Maria: "He was a strict vegetarian and he believed that if you ate an animal you were eating the fear in the animal as it was caught, so he was very strict about that. Slowly over time his philosophies evolved and then when he started the family he had the commands for the age of Aquarius and that was kind of the basis for the group."
On the "Aquarian family":
Maria: "Well he named himself 'Father' and actually Robin, his first wife, was 'Mother' in the family, so there was a father and a mother and as people started joining the family he would sit down with them and he would give them names. They had various names like Electricity the Aquarian, Omni the Aquarian, or Magus the Aquarian, but I think that you know he was inspired by some quality or some spark that he saw in each person and he would bestow them with a name that was a descriptive for that quality."
On the appeal of the family:
Marie: "Well, he was wildly charismatic and you know we interviewed over forty source family members and they all kind of say the same story which was they saw him and it was an instant feeling it wasn't something that evolved over time it was just like this gravitation toward the family. So I think Jim Baker himself had this great storytelling quality. He would give meditations early in the morning. A lot of family members talk about how those meditations were really the heart of the experience, that something happened in those meditations that just moved them and they were all unified in those moments."
On the dark side of the Family:
Jodi: "They kind of revelled in their outlaw ways. There were a lot of things that had dark aspects to the family, I mean it was a high risk social experiment. Jim Baker had an ego and he also liked the ladies, and the ladies really liked him. When he decided to deviate from one of his ten commandments which was, 'A man and his woman are one and nothing should separate them,' when he decided to just break that commandment himself he married between thirteen to fourteen different people. They were also doing a lot of things that were illegal at the time that at that point seemed crazy to some people but are now are mainstream like breastfeeding in public, homeschooling and things like that."
On the move to Hawaii:
Maria: "Well they were under a lot of scrutiny by the authorities at that point the Manson killings had occured, and a lot of people were checking out the restaurant and checking out the house, there was 140 people living in a three bedroom house so obviously they drew a lot of attention from the neighbors and the authorities.
Jodi: "Things were really rough in Hawaii, they ended up ultimately leaving Kawaii, going to San Francisco for three months, and they ended up back on the big island, and at that point the family members tell us that Father was really just exhausted. He seemed tired he kept asking people to leave he said, 'Listen I've taught you everything I know its time for you to go,' nobody would leave so he actually took his wives and moved to a glass house in Oahu with some hang gliding friends. One day he said in mediation class that he was going hang gliding. Everyone knew that he had never gone hang gliding before, so he went onto the highest cliff and jumped off the cliff and he went straight down and he dropped many of hundreds of feet. Then the family members took him back to the house where he laid for nine hours and he passed."
On why the Source Family fell apart:
Maria: "I think they were doing something that was wildly experimental, was a social experiment right in the middle of Los Angeles, and they were doing something that most people wouldn't take the risk to do. I think that because they were living in this very extreme way, they open described to us the life was like a roller coaster, things would change everyday it was as if in one year they lived an entire lifetime. One of the things that Jodi and I walked away with this film is that we realized that these kind of experiments are ways of looking at other ways of thinking and a lot of the people who lived on communes during that period of time went on to be visionaries of our culture. Taking away from that they're able to move forward in their lives and really think in different ways."
Los Angeles fails to foster diversity for city contract deals
More than a decade ago, voters in California approved a measure that barred any state government agency from considering factors like race or gender when it came to awarding public contracts.
Advocates for groups representing firms owned by women and minorities lamented the decision. But in 2001, then-mayor Richard Riordan created an initiative in Los Angeles to ensure that firms owned by women and minorities got, "an equal opportunity to participate in the performance of all city contracts."
But according to a report by Bloomberg, firms owned by white men won nearly all of the contracts awarded by the city. And by nearly all, we mean 92 percent.
James Nash, a reporter with Bloomberg, joins the show with more.
Nevada hospital accused of bussing patients may lose funding
Last month, the Sacramento Bee uncovered the story of a Las Vegas psychiatric hospital which has been bussing hundreds of patients to cities and towns throughout the country.
One-third of those patients have wound up here in California, and when they arrive, they often have no family or support system to turn to. Now the findings by a federal investigation could strip the hospital of funding.
Joining us for more is Phillip Reese, who's been covering this story for the Sacramento Bee.
'Motherhood, Rescheduled' and how egg freezing is allowing women to wait
This weekend is Mother's Day, a time to celebrate moms and all the hard work they do.
Mother's Day has been an official American holiday since 1914, but when it comes to motherhood, much has changed over the past century. In recent years, women have been able to postpone parenthood to pursue careers or to find the perfect mate thanks to advances in modern medicine.
Journalist Sarah Elizabeth Richards writes about the effects of those advances in her new book "Motherhood, Rescheduled: The New Frontier of Egg Freezing and the Women Who Tried It."
US Marines launch campaign to recruit Asian Americans
The US Marines are looking for a few more good men and women. And in particular, a few good Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders.
The Corps launched a new ad campaign this week called "A Warrior's Education," featuring Asian-American officers speaking about the importance of values like discipline and respect. The ads were created to align with Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month, May 8 to June 7.
"It makes sense that the Marines are attempting to recruit Asian Americans, because we have to remember that the military is a business, and this is a market that's not been completely tapped," said Tracy Lachica Buenavista, who teaches Asian American Studies at Cal State Northridge. "Further, there's still a very strong military presence in Asian and Pacific Islander nation states, so it's really strategic to hire APIs that can provide linguistic and cultural translation for military operations and projects."
In this clip from one of the videos, First Lieutenant David Pham talks about how important respect was in his upbringing:
In another video, Pham speaks about the importance of discipline:
"These ads are really grounded in the stereotype of Asian-Pacific Islanders in the US as these model minorities that have hyper-disciplinary practices within their families," said Buenavista. "Not only does it essentialize API individuals, but it really obscures our diversity, and it also inadvertently assumes that other people of color don't possess these same characteristics."
Enlistment of Asian Americans has risen dramatically in recent years. In 2009, Los Angeles alone saw an 80 percent increase in Asian American recruits, but overall Asian Americans account for just 2.41 percent of the Marine Corps, and Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, .65 percent. Whites make up 68.86 percent, followed by Latinos at 13.46 percent and African Americans at 10.13 percent.
"The uptick has really been a result of these racialized recruitment strategies, where they're coming up with programs that make it more desireable for certain communities to enlist," said Buenavista. "I think the thing all branches of the military should do in terms of the recruitment strategies is really be honest in regards to what service actually looks like, what it looks like after war, where the implications during war."
Math by way of art: For Pasadena school, arts plus math is really adding up
For the past several years, math proficiency scores for California's elementary students have lagged behind those in English and science. Administrators and teachers have been asking themselves the same question: How do you bring those scores up in a workforce that relies more and more on technology?
KPCC's Mary Plummer found teachers who are trying a creative approach.
Vintage Surf Auction sells off pieces of wave-riding history
The Surfing Heritage Vintage Surf Auction takes place Saturday, and up for auction are vintage surfboards from the 1920s to the 1980s, as well as surfing memorabilia and art. Dubbed California Gold, the live auction features 50 historically relevant vintage surfboards & memorabilia and a silent auction featuring 40 surfboards, art, collectibles and more.
Host Alex Cohen speaks with Scott Bass, the director/producer of the event.
The Greyboy Allstars return with 'Inland Emperor,' their first album in 6 years
The band The Greyboy Allstars got their start two decades ago at a bar in San Diego. Their new album, "Inland Emperor," is to say the very least, very very funky.
Here to tell us more about the new record is the band's guitarist Michael Andrews and keyboardist Robert Walter.