At 2,500 pages of legislation and even more pages of still unwritten regulation, health reform isn’t easy to comprehend.

But we can be sure of two things, as Duke Helfand, a Los Angeles Times health reporter, explained. “It has great potential to open access to care for millions of people,” he said. “But the criticism is it doesn’t do enough to tackle and address the underlying costs of that care.”

At an event made possible by the California HealthCare Foundation and moderated by Helfand, the California HealthCare Foundation’s Marian Mulkey, Jan Spencley of San Diegans for Healthcare Coverage, Small Business Majority Founder and CEO John Arensmeyer, and Lucien Wulsin of the Insure the Uninsured Project explained what the law does, what it means for Californians, businesses, doctors and insurers, and where it may fall short.

Work in progress

Despite its length, the law “is a work in progress,” Mulkey said. “There is a lot we still don’t know.” Many of the law’s major provisions won’t unfold until 2014, and the effect may not be felt until years later. The law will expand access to health insurance coverage, she said. First, it will expand Medicaid — which in California is called MediCal, a program that has historically served poor women, children, and the disabled. Under the new law, MediCal will cover anyone up to a particular level of income, “a big philosophical change,” Mulkey said. The law also significantly changes the private health insurance market: it requires that insurers sell to anyone willing to pay, and requires individuals to purchase health insurance, with subsidies up to a moderate income level, and with an easier reviewing, comparing and purchasing process, called an exchange. And though the law makes no mention of state-based single-payer systems, states are allowed to experiment starting in 2017 with their own systems, as long as they provide the same or a higher level of care.

Other measures in the law aim to make healthcare more efficient — creating incentives for delivering preventive care and training physicians and other healthcare providers. “With more people covered, there’s more demand for services than, perhaps, our current workforce and our current arrangements can provide,” Mulkey said.

The law’s provisions won’t come at a low cost, she emphasized. Much of the money will come from changes in Medicare financing, making it possible to deliver care at lower cost. New fees on devices, the health insurance sector, and new taxes will fund the rest, along with penalties on employers and individuals who don’t comply.

Get in line early

The law’s provisions for the uninsured are particularly crucial for California, Wulsin explained. As of 2007, the state had 6.5 million uninsured people — nearly one in five of its population under 65, and one of the highest rates in the country. Eighty-five percent of those are working people, and 80 percent are citizens or legal permanent residents. The recession compounded the problem, and the latest estimates show that one in four Californians under 65 is uninsured.

Anyone without insurance currently has to pay out of pocket for any care outside a community hospital or clinic, and often the prices are three times as high as an insured person would pay. Many uninsured people wait until their health requires a visit to the emergency room — meaning higher rates of death, serious illness, and bankruptcy.

So far, Wulsin explained, California is taking some steps to help its uninsured before the law’s provisions take hold in 2014. The state will receive $760 million to launch a new high-risk pool to cover about 30,000 people, beginning in September. (Californians can sign up at mrmib.ca.gov, though it’s still unclear what premiums will be, Mulkey noted in Q&A.) This will allow uninsured individuals to buy private insurance if they can afford it. “It’s good to get in that line early,” Wulsin said. Also effective this year, children will be able to get coverage regardless of preexisting conditions, and young adults will be allowed extended coverage on their parents’ plans. Finally, states and governments are negotiating a plan that would allow counties to double the money they currently spend on the uninsured, Wulsin said, which they’ll hopefully finish by September.

Healthcare is local

The law also has important provisions for small businesses, Arensmeyer said. California alone has one million small businesses with employees, and three million self-employed people, “who have an even tougher time getting insurance, a huge impediment for people to start businesses,” he said. Right now, 86 percent of small businesses that don’t offer insurance cite cost as the factor; 72 percent that do offer insurance say they’re worried about being able to continue providing it. Without the health reform in place, small businesses would have to pay $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years, losing $1 billion in wages and much more in profits.

Starting this year, Arensmeyer said, health reform will offer tax credits for businesses with fewer than 25 employees, most with wages below $50,000, likely benefiting 80 percent of California’s small businesses. Big businesses over a certain size that don’t offer insurance will have to pay a fee, but that’s only about four percent of businesses, he said. The high-risk pool will help the self-employed immediately, as well. And, Arensmeyer said, the planned exchanges could be a major boon in the long term, eliminating the advantages bigger businesses have in negotiating for lower costs. Small businesses today pay 18 percent more than bigger ones for insurance, on average, he said, adding that the exchanges need to be governed well and explained clearly.

Localities play a crucial role in educating Californians about the law. “Healthcare is local,” Spencley said, and it may fall to local communities to explain who’s eligible for what care. “This isn’t a perfect bill. This is an incredible first step,” she said, noting that right now, Californians are paying not just in higher premiums and taxes. “We’re paying in people being left in poverty,” for people’s loss of productivity, for people waiting too long to get care.

Travelocity for health care

Though the exchanges are three years away, they’ll transform how we receive health insurance. States have until 2014 to set up their own exchanges, with a variety of options: they can be statewide or regional, with varying levels of care provided, and varying levels of negotiation with insurance plans allowed. Spencley threw in her support for regional exchanges, given the vast size of California compared to other states. With bills passed by the state Senate and Assembly, he said, “California has started probably sooner than any state down this path.” And no matter the specifics, there will be more choice and more transparency, Arensmeyer said, as long as it’s a user-friendly process.

The exchange could work something like Travelocity or Priceline, Wulsin said: “This will all happen, hopefully, in a very very simple web-based way.” But, he noted, there is only one operational exchange in this country, in Massachusetts. “The opportunities to mess this up are legion,” he said. “This is the best part of the bill, and the most challenging part.”

Primary care first

As Helfand noted, all the new coverage — no bans for patients with preexisting conditions, no annual or lifetime limits for payments — could mean a much bigger burden on doctors. Primary care physicians are in short supply, particularly in urban and many rural areas, Mulkey said. “There isn’t a short-term answer. The pipeline for doctors and nurses — it takes time. It doesn’t turn on a dime.” Some efforts are already under way thanks to the stimulus package, which included money for doctors to install new data systems or electronic medical care that can help people treat themselves when an office visit isn’t necessary. “There needs to be a lot of creative thinking from every corner of the health care system to take advantage of all the promise in the bill,” Mulkey said.

Spencley noted that nurses and physician’s assistants could pick up some of the burden. The National Health Service Corps also is likely to add 15,000 primary care physicians for underserved and low-income populations. “People are not selecting primary care as a specialty in medical school and there’s a reason for that,” she said. “They don’t get paid.” Wulsin agreed, noting that only about two percent of graduated medical students go into primary care, though the law does offer primary care reimbursements.

Hospitals, too, will have to become more efficient with their costs. “Price signals, the kind of things that drive all businesses to get better and better, to do things well for less — those have not been visible” for hospitals, Mulkey said, because they shift their costs to private insurers or Medicare and Medicaid.  As Helfand noted, today, hospital costs and policies are so obscure that he interviewed a man who paid $44,000 for a knee surgery at one hospital, and $97,000 for the exact same procedure at another local hospital, even with the same surgeon.

Strange state

heWhether the law’s new provisions will drive premiums up or down is debatable, Wulsin said — preventive care could lower costs, getting rid of payment caps could push it up. The exchange could decrease prices, but it will increase the number of people covered, which would drive prices up. On average, Wulsin said, large employers will see a slight decrease, and small businesses could see either a slight increase or a slight decrease. Premiums have long risen faster than the economy, and in the short term, insurers and businesses reacting to short-term changes could cause premiums to go up. “There is an opportunity for things to get worse before they get better,” Mulkey said. Still, she noted, the costs will be going toward more comprehensive care.

Arensmeyer argued that the growth of costs isn’t going to come down in a big way until delivery reform and more robust cost containment mechanisms go into place. “All of us up here would’ve wanted more in the bill,” he said. “Negative cost containment means there is always some interest group who’s affected by that.”

As for those interest groups and the current gubernatorial election in California, the panelists were mum about who would do better on health. “Both candidates have been pretty quiet around any of the specifics,” Mulkey said. And the Insurance Commissioner, while powerful, oversees a smaller share of the insurance system than the overnor-appointed head of the Department of Health Management. As Helfand put it, “It’s a strange system we have in California.”

Watch the video here.
See more photos here.
Read In The Green Room Q&As with John Arensmeyer, Duke Helfand, Marian Mulkey, Jan Spencley, and Lucien Wulsin.
Read six health care experts on what the reform means for the state economy here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

As David Pagel explained, in the 1990s, when much of art concerned identity, “Salomón Huerta made a name for himself by getting rid of the self.”

Huerta painted the backs of heads, life-sized bodies seen from behind, and masked wrestlers, exhibiting around the world and being featured at the Whitney Biennial. In an event co-presented with the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, Huerta chatted with Pagel, an art critic, and a packed house at MOCA Grand Avenue about his work, and how he always destroys it before he makes it.

Method painting

Huerta began by showing slides of his work from the past year — portraits of women, nudes, his father’s gun — that he created on canvas stretched over panels. In each case, he explained, he destroyed the piece with a sander, often several times, sometimes in one day, sometimes over months, before painting again on the same canvas. It’s a process he’s always followed, since art school days, when he hated clutter and got used to doing a piece “over and over and over and if it’s not good you get a bad grade,” he said. But, Huerta admitted, the sander is new.

Still, Huerta said, his process isn’t as intense as, for example, Daniel Day-Lewis’ method acting. For his role in “Gangs of New York”, the actor worked for months as a butcher. “My sander’s nothing compared to that,” Huerta said.

Power sander for the soul

Huerta described the emotional stages of making a finished painting, describing his first attempt as characterized by fear. “I get blinded,” he said. “I’m not able to see what I need to see.” His fear sometimes keeps him working on easier paintings instead of more difficult ones. After destroying this first try, his ego takes over.

“As I’m painting I think, ‘Ah, this is going to sell, I’m going to eat sushi, I’m going to travel,’” he said. “Then the next day I look at it and think, ‘Oh my God this is horrible.’” The ego stage sometimes requires therapy — Huerta visits a homeopath.

“A power sander for your psyche,” Pagel joked.

“She gives me this little white ball, the size of a ladybug, it’s a little remedy,” Huerta said, for the emotions his paintings often stir, for the destructive tendency that drives some artist but that Huerta finds unhealthy.

Pagel asked Huerta the difference between painting and therapy, “It’s really easy to get rid of a problem when it’s a painting. It’s not that easy to get rid of a problem that’s emotional,” Huerta replied. “I have to deal with it. I probably have to call someone and apologize.”

Facebook tales

After ego comes the denial stage — convincing himself that he’s happy with the work, until he destroys it another time.

“Then I come into the piece with no judgment, no happiness. I don’t need to be focused. There’s no ego, no fear, and I’m able to then just do it,” Huerta said. “It’s like meditation.” He added in Q&A, “I have friends who go into the studio and they’re so happy about their painting. Sometimes I feel a little left out or jealous, but for me, I realize that it’s not about pleasure, it’s more about being at peace.”

But Huerta does plan to let the destroyed pieces live on, in a book about his process that will include not only the destruction but another of Huerta’s coping methods: Facebook. When the mood strikes him, when a painting stirs a memory, Huerta pens brief stories that he posts online.   It’s distinct from the way other artists Huerta knows use Facebook, he said. “They’re like, ‘this is the painting I did this morning.’ I don’t do that,” he said.

Maybe he’s crazy

The destruction doesn’t always end with a finished work. Sometimes, Huerta noted, he wants to destroy paintings he’s already sold, unhappy with the idea of it representing him. He goes so far as to take it back from buyers. “I tell them, look, I’ll give you a new piece if you give me that old piece. Some, I had to give them a big piece just to get a little piece,” he said.

“They’re smart people,” Pagel replied.

And other artists, family, and friends can be puzzled by the method. “When I tell other artists to destroy, they go crazy, they want to kill me,” Huerta said. But, he explained, the longer he lets a painting linger, the more people — family, friends, dealers, collectors — see it and start appreciating it. “Then I don’t have the desire to improve it, to capture what I really wanted.”

Collectors sometimes disagree with the process, as well. Huerta described making monoprints, and not getting quite what he wanted until the fifth attempt. But a collector asked to buy the fourth attempt. Huerta replied that it wasn’t for sale. When the collector insisted, Huerta penciled an X through the work. The collector said he would pay cash, still. Huerta finally ripped it up.

“He paused and he looked at me and said, ‘You’re crazy,’” Huerta said. “I thought to myself, ‘Well maybe I am.’”

Ex girl to the next girl

The new paintings Huerta showed have no particular theme, unlike his past works, which sometimes made him feel too constricted. “I don’t want to create a series anymore. You get locked in,” he said, adding that he wouldn’t hire other artists to paint copies of his work, as some do. “I don’t want to make a production line.”

Whereas Huerta’s past series were based on inspirations he found in movies and magazines, he said, “Now I’m not stimulated by those things. Now I have to work for it and look for it.”

His upcoming show with Patrick Painter, in January, is his deadline for wrapping up work and stopping the destruction process. “I’m not going to invite Patrick over, because he’ll take everything,” Huerta joked.

But fortunately, Huerta said, the pressure of destruction helps him create his best work. “It’s like inviting your ex-girlfriend to dinner with your new girlfriend,” he said. “You have to let it go.” He’s never regretted destroying a work, and he doesn’t thrive on the conflict that sometimes seems to be associated with art, and destroying art. As he put it, “I enjoy going to yoga and looking at the trees and being happy.”

Watch the video here.
See more photos here.
Read In The Green Room Q&As with Salomón Huerta and David Pagel.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

Even though it was 15 years ago, Jonathan Gold remembers an unnerving conversation with Campanile chef Mark Peel about fish: Peel predicted then that in 40 years, eating wild fish would be as odd as eating wild game.

“Now, only 15 years later, it seems almost frighteningly close to being true,” said Gold to the full house at the Skirball Cultural Center.

Gold joined his brother and Heal the Bay President Mark Gold, Santa Monica Seafood’s Logan Kock, and Providence chef Michael Cimarusti to see whether our seafood diets are long for this world, what we should be eating, and whether labels and laws can save ocean ecosystems.

Infants the size of whales

As Mark Gold explained, gauging the extent of the fishing problem can be difficult: marine ecologists and ocean population experts estimate that somewhere between 25 and 75 percent of the world’s fisheries are in a state of drastic decline. It’s a wide range, Gold acknowledged. “But the one thing everyone would agree on is that it’s dramatically worse today than it was even a decade ago,” he said, making the need to move to sustainable fishing practices a critical one.

Kock was a bit more optimistic about the state of the oceans, and the ability of the American government to do something about it in the next few years. “Things are worse than they were 10 years ago, but I think they’re better than they were five years ago,” he said, given the increasing awareness among governments, buyers like Kock, farmers and restaurateurs. Kock noted that certain species, like swordfish, are rising again.

Still, as Mark Gold pointed out and as Kock agreed, other countries aren’t doing as well. Many developing nations are selling their fishing rights for cash, leaving local fishermen without product. Cimarusti noted that prices abroad push down the selling ability of local American fishermen. Jonathan Gold noted that farming practices pollute the oceans and breed genetically modified fish. “Not only are salmon not allowed to be salmon, but you’re basically eating infants that are the size of whales,” he said.

Mark Gold emphasized that there’s no agreement on how to manage fisheries globally, and governments don’t have a strong track record with such legislation. “Pick an issue other than the Montreal protocol or CFCs, and there’s very little in the way of success,” he said. Other countries are also consuming more seafood or pursuing unsustainable methods of catching it.

Sticking to locally caught fish, however, can be difficult, as Cimarusti said. The California options — anchovies, squid — might not do so well on a menu with wild Alaskan halibut or king salmon. “I still think most people would rather have wild Alaskan salmon than grilled sardines. I certainly don’t blame them for that,” Cimarusti said. “I have to buy fish that I think people want to eat.”

Bluefin and tater tots

One such fish seems to be bluefin tuna, one of the few truly “global fish,” as Cimarusti put it, and the most commodified in the world. “At one point it was cod, but that’s not the case anymore because it’s gone,” he said. Cimarusti’s Providence hasn’t served it in years — crucial, as Kock pointed out, considering that 75 to 80 percent of seafood consumption in the U.S. occurs in restaurants. “Chefs probably have the strongest voice out there, and in a way the biggest responsibility,” Kock said, adding that he doesn’t sell bluefin tuna.

Cimarusti noted that Providence doesn’t serve bluefin, and the decision wasn’t difficult because the fish isn’t and has never been a staple food. “No one is going to die if we stop fishing for bluefin tuna. It’s not rice. It’s not bread,” he said. He also dismissed cultural or rights arguments to fishing the species.

But without a treaty that prevents selling them across international lines, the fish is in danger as a species. Cimarusti advocated a complete moratorium in the Gulf and along the Eastern seaboard for up to a decade to give the fish time to recover. Mark Gold noted that existing legislation is doing little to save bluefin tuna, and he doubted that other regulations could work, prompting Cimarusti to turn to the crowd.

“Raise your hand and pledge against bluefin tuna,” Cimarusti said, as the audience followed along. “Let’s do it right now.”

And even though the panelists agreed that habits die hard, Cimarusti said, “I don’t eat tater tots but I’m perfectly fine with that.”

“You’re missing out,” Mark Gold said.

Remember abalone

Where habits are hard to change, regulation could lead the way, the panelists noted. Cimarusti pointed out that the seafood industry is nowhere near as well- or thoroughly-regulated as the beef industry in the U.S. Kock cited the success of the Marine Stewardship Council in evaluating sustainable fisheries and labeling their stock as such, leading to the positive management of fish like Chilean sea bass. The only caveat, Kock said, was the royalties the company charges for its label. The royalty means that products that bring in less money, like squid, can’t afford to carry the labels. Jonathan Gold also noted that the agency has made some questionable approvals. Kock agreed that the effort wasn’t perfect.

Mark Gold and Kock also noted that they’re part of an effort to regulate seafood in California by a labeling process. But Gold did note that much California seafood comes from out of state. Proposed marine protection areas, he added, may not be successful either, because of the infighting between sports and commercial fisherman and ecologists. Big sport fishing areas like Rocky Point on the Palos Verdes Peninsula may not be protected, even though it’s the most ecologically important area in the region, Gold said: “It’s not like the recommendations are being made by marine scientists.”

Not all individual fishing is bad. Cimarusti recalled Californians years ago diving for and eating abalone, along with residents of his native Rhode Island eating what they could catch. “People feel they have this right to whatever they can avail themselves of,” he said. “I think it’s very healthy and something we should strive to get back to.”

Worms, squirts, rays, jellyfish

And there’s more than abalone to eat, the panelists noted.

“Are you going to talk to us about eating live octopus now?” Mark Gold asked his brother.

“I’ve had it,” Cimarusti said. “I liked it.”

“Have you had it braised for a long time til it gets really soft?” Jonathan asked of sea cucumber.

“See what I have to live with?” Mark said. Cimarusti and Jonathan recalled eating sea squirts and sea worms, which Jonathan described as “sickly long wagging pink penises.” Cimarusti said the worms had the texture of a garden hose; Jonathan described squirts as something like “hard rubber balls.”

Kock chimed in with a more serious suggestions, noting the broad but effective red-green-yellow rubric of what’s safe to eat. He also named the Chesapeake Ray, an intermediary on the food chain that now lacks enough predators (sharks) or prey, like oysters. “We become the sharks,” Kock said. While Mark worried about restaurants starting to serve manta ray instead, Jonathan remembered a delicious ray soup and lamented the process of actually cooking the barbed animal. Kock added that “The meat is more like veal,” while Cimarusti seemed eager to try some.

When all else fails, Jonathan Gold had a suggestion. “Really eat as much jelly fish as you can. Feed it to your dog. Feed it to your cat,” he said. “Pretend it’s snow at Christmas time.”

Mark Gold had a final tip for what not to eat. “The worst salmon I ever had,” he said, turning to his brother, “was at your Pulitzer award dinner.”

Jonathan replied, “And I had 120 people thinking they were being bright and original by asking me to review the lunch.”

Watch the video here.
See more photos here.
Read In The Green Room Q&As with Michael Cimarusti, Jonathan Gold, Mark Gold, and Logan Kock.
Read five food fans — Kogi chef Roy Choi, Teenage Glutster Javier Cabral, Artbites’ Maite Gomez-Rejón, photographer Charlie Grosso, and Eater LA’s Kat Odell — discuss the cruelest foods they’ve ever eaten.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

As the economy puts the skids on McMansions, Dubai towers, and all the projects that might give architects a bad name, Frances Anderton thought it time to correct some misconceptions.

“Architects have strong egos, but they also have strong ideals,” said Anderton, host of KCRW’s DnA: Design and Architecture.

In an event co-sponsored by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Anderton talked with an architect well known for his ideals. Michael Maltzan’s award-winning work encompasses everything from homes for clients like Michael Ovitz to a series of Skid Row apartments. He joined Anderton and a full house at the Petersen Automotive Museum to explain what luxury is, whether good design can be affordable, and whether architecture can change lives.

Genie in a bottle

Architecture schools today stick to the modernist tradition, Anderton and Maltzan agreed, of emphasizing the architect’s role in improving lives, including across the income scale, transgressing or collapsing traditional social boundaries. Still, they said, the architect’s role is often limited — only a portion of buildings are designed by architects, and architects sometime enter the process at a late stage. “The genie’s out of the bottle,” Maltzan said. “You’re trying to find a way to massage its direction.”

And the involvement of architects doesn’t necessary make design good or bad — many factors contribute to the content of the city, Maltzan said. “Architects take on everything they can, but we often know that it’s not completely possible.”

Quality, not price tags

For Maltzan, luxury doesn’t necessarily require high expenses or fancy materials. “In most cases it comes down to a quality of thinking, a quality of approach,” he said. Architects are trained to produce aesthetically appealing and important buildings but also an intelligent way of addressing problems and working on a budget. And, Maltzan said no matter the type of project, “The budget is always an issue. It doesn’t matter how much you think you have.” In fact, having less, or designing in a particular location, can have a positive impact on the work. Maltzan credits his Skid Row projects, and his collaborators, for helping him hone his sense of what architecture is. “We’ve had to be much more precise, much more focused, to imagine what is fundamental to architecture,” he said.

There is also a social dimension of luxury that transcends simple splendor for an individual — and the key to this broader luxury is endurance, Maltzan said. Buildings that resonate and communicate with history are more likely to endure.

Silos

Maltzan’s first project for an underserved community was the Inner-City Arts campus, which he began working on in 1993. The project came, as Anderton noted, on the heels of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which gave architects pause about the city and its forgotten communities. They had a particularly strong influence on Maltzan, who had recently adopted Los Angeles as his home. “To see the city rip itself apart, and do that kind of damage to the place I’d fallen in love with, was devastating,” Maltzan said. The city seemed multicultural, and thought of itself as such, Maltzan said, but in fact its many cultures were separated in what he described as “siloization,” allowed by the city. “That is one of the characteristics of an unsustainable city,” he said.

Maltzan’s housing projects and his Inner-City Arts campus were part of an overarching effort to transform the city. “Each of those buildings is an incremental step,” he said, “to help this culture, this city, any contemporary city, find its way to that more progressive and optimistic future that the modernists imagined.”

White paint and optimism

Inner-City Arts gave Maltzan a chance to build a functional arts school for children — with studio spaces for painting, drama, music — and to organize the campus “as a neighborhood, surrounding a kind of Zócalo, a kind of common space.”

Maltzan worked his design into an existing building and an empty parking lot. He also took advantage of materials found on Skid Row — raw wood, gas station doors, post office flooring — creating new palettes and relationships. “It wasn’t about whether the materials were luxurious or expensive or not. It was the way we used those materials that had everything to do with the sensibility they communicated,” Maltzan said.

The building’s white paint, Maltzan said, “was possibly the most radical architectural gesture we could make,” even more than the sculptural form of the buildings. “It was trying to produce a deep sense of optimism,” he said.  It created a social compact with the neighborhood that, Maltzan said, has worked. The building is free from damage and graffiti, children and families have embraced it, its work has expanded to older children, and many go on to study art in college. The building’s success made the clients believers, Maltzan said, of the transformative power of architecture.

Public and private

Maltzan’s housing projects required a change in the way the homeless were sheltered. Housing had to go from single-room-occupancy — renting on a nightly or weekly basis with support services located off-site — to permanent supportive housing, creating a community among the residents.

His buildings reemphasized this shift, creating spaces for community within. They start by making homeless shelter far from anonymous. Each iconic building on Skid Row becomes an intense and identifiable presence that residents recognize and proudly make home. “It’s emphatically present in a city that has tried to produce an amnesia about those districts,” Maltzan said. Inside, the buildings negotiate the complex public and private lives of its residents. Chronically homeless men and women have lived constantly exposed and visible, drastically transforming the way they see their lives. “Many of these individuals create a private life like a kind of shell,” he said. “They turn inside themselves.” Maltzan’s buildings encourage maintaining a semi-public space for social interaction, to let residents build their own private and public lives.

His Rainbow Apartments, which filled a space between a larger set of buildings, has a visible lobby and stairs that lead to a courtyard, with services provided on the ground floor. “I don’t think we did as good a job there as I wanted,” he said, citing budget constraints that limited the ability to use glass to create a sense of openness. The New Carver Apartments, meanwhile, spiral services throughout the building, dispersing social space, and emphasizing the laundry and television rooms. “They’re mutually supportive,” Maltzan joked. The forthcoming Star Apartments, Maltzan said, will feature retail on the first floor, creating “more conversant, more traditional type of activity on the street itself.”

“I do believe architects can change the world. I still believe that,” Maltzan said. And he had hopes for L.A. as the recession lifts. “If things ever come back, and I hope they do, we’ll already be well into the conversation of what we want the city to feel like and be like.”

Watch the video here.
See more photos here.
Read In The Green Room Q&As with Frances Anderton and Michael Maltzan.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

When he set out to write Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India 18 months ago, William Dalrymple hoped to find a Bengali man legendary for his skull collection.

“Being a latent Orientalist, this sounded like very promising material,” Dalrymple said to the crowd at the Hammer Museum.

Dalrymple found the skulls and their keeper, Tapan Goswami, who fed the skulls rum, whiskey and lentils, painted them red to stop them from molding in the monsoon, and was initially open chatting with Dalrymple until he suddenly clammed up. When pressed, Goswami said to Dalrymple, “It’s not you I’m worried about, it’s my two boys — they’re ophthalmologists in New Jersey. They say, ‘Dad you must stop going on about this black magic stuff.’”

In other words, as Dalrymple said, “It’s tough being an Orientalist these days. You go searching for these guys and you find out they’ve got cousins at the Hammer.” Dalrymple explored through the stories of three individuals the ways in which old India, its monks, dancers, and mystics, remains intact — if deeply affected by — the new India and the broader world.

Passports courtesy Mick Jagger

As Dalrymple noted, much has been written about the new India. Its economy is growing at a galloping pace, and according to some estimates will overtake the U.S. by 2050. However, as Dalrymple noted in Q&A, the growth is uneven, relying on “an elite of supertechies” rather than a large manufacturing base like China’s. Still, he said, it is a hopeful time and an “astonishing transition.”

Dalrymple went after the old India — “the strange vocations, all the different ways of being Indian,” he said. “What happened to those fakirs on their nail beds you read about in 19th-century picture books?” Sometimes when Dalrymple found such men, he found contradictions like the one above. He and his wife encountered a “picture-perfect naga sadhu,” for instance, who spoke perfect English, had an MBA, and once worked selling refrigerator parts in Bombay. Two of the “gnarled old minstrels from Bengal” he interviewed, who lived in huts near a cremation ground, had passports. When Dalrymple asked why, they replied, “Some English singer got us over 20 years ago for an event. Called Mick something.” It was Mick Jagger’s party for the Beggars Banquet album release.

“There is a whole world in transition, suspended between modernity and tradition,” Dalrymple said.

Mad and sightless

Among all the traditions he encountered, Dalrymple said, “If I had to convert by force to any of these religions I might well become a Baul.” The term means “madmen” in Bengali, he said, and their philosophy is a palimpsest of all the cultures that passed through Bengal — Vaishnava Hinduism, Sufi Islam, Tantra, and Buddhism. Bauls travel from village to village singing songs. They believe in no eternal deity, and that attending a place of worship or praying to an idol is useless. “The only God that there is, is the heart of the man,” Dalrymple said. “To discover yourself — it’s very Californian, and yet its 600 years old.”

Dalrymple reported on a pair of Baul friends from opposite ends of village society. Kanai was the son of a landless Dalit laborer, who became blind from smallpox and lost his family to accidents and suicide before he joined the Bauls. Debdas was the son of a Brahmin so conservative that he “disinfected” cigarettes made by his Muslim friend by touching them against cow dung. Debdas became a Baul after attending a great festival that, Dalrymple said, “makes Woodstock look like a kind of Rotarian dinner,” where 25,000 musicians gather and get high and sing. Debdas’ family disowned him, and he in turn gave up his caste. The two friends were separated only once — when Debdas became obsessed with trying to live without food. He managed to stop eating entirely, until he became delusional. Kennai had a premonition of his friend in danger and saved him. As Dalrymple quoted, “Sometimes the mad and sightless can understand things better than the sane and sighted. The blind are never deceived by appearances.”

Part-time gods

Many of these religions traditions are still highly segregated by region, Dalrymple noted. And the most spectacular such form he saw was an incarnational dance in the state of Kerala, in which Dalit dancers take on the role of deities for a few months a year. Dalrymple described seeing one such performance and speaking to the dancer, Hari Das. When Dalrymple finds Hari Das, Das is lying mostly naked on a mat, having makeup applied to his face to transform him into the god Vishnu. When Dalrymple asks Das if he is nervous, Das answers, “It’s more the fear that he might refuse to come. The intensity of your devotion determines the intensity of the possession. If it becomes even once routine, the gods may stop coming.” Das describes the dance as a blinding light, a trance, until the end, which he says is “like the incision of a surgeon.”

Dalrymple also learns that Das spends most of the year as a well-digger and prison warden. “I’m poor enough to do anything if it pays my wage,” Das tells him, describing the prison as chaotic, a battleground between rival extreme right and left political parties. But for two months, Das is a “part-time god,” whom even Brahmins worship. “It’s a safety valve,” Dalrymple said during Q&A, of the flipped caste hierarchy the dance represents. “It is not unlike Carnival in Europe — where the sexual structure is inverted for a period of time.”

Lace and lattice

Dalrymple also studied one branch of Muslim tradition. The Sufis, he said, “are the great underrated force of South Asian Islam.” While Americans are only vaguely aware of Sufism — of Rumi and mystic poetry — Sufi shrines in South Asia are nearly as important as mosques. “Women come and tie lace around a lattice asking for a job for their husband or child or marriage for a daughter,” he said. The shrines also serve a social function. “In the West, if you fall through the cracks, you end up in a sleeping bag outside a Wal-Mart,” he said. “In India, you sit in the cremation ground and you’re treated as a divine being. It’s not a bad solution to a universal problem.”

Sufism in South Asia is heavily influenced by Hindu mysticism, and they preach that all religions are different manifestations of the same reality. In various Sufi poems, the mullah is portrayed as either a contemptible “legalistic puritan” or a figure of fun. Today of course, Dalrymple said, mullahs are empowered in part due to funding from the U.S., Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia beginning decades ago. Extremists attack Sufi shrines in the Middle East, if not in South Asia thus far. Wahhabism has also spread, equated with status and wealth. “The equivalent in the Christian world would be if oil was found underneath some particularly vile Serbian Orthodox warlord,” he said. “That fringe sect suddenly [finds] itself as the most powerful force in the Christian world.” When Dalrymple visited one Sufi, Sain Fakir, he insisted that Sufi poems are the “essence of the spirit of the Koran,” which Fakir said was sometimes difficult to understand and thus easily distorted. Fakir praised Sufism as understanding  of human weakness, of the reality of sin, of forgiveness.

And they have a telling notion of hell. As one woman told Dalrymple, a Sufi folk story describes when the saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar tried to go to hell to find fire for warmth on Earth. Dalrymple quoted: “There is no fire in hell. Everyone who goes there brings their own fire, and their own pain, from this world.”

Watch the video here.
Watch a highlight clip here.
See more photos here.
Buy the book here.
Read an excerpt here.
Read Dalrymple’s In The Green Room Q&A here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

After transforming from an advocate of the Iraq war to an opponent, Peter Beinart knew he had to make sense of the ideas “that led me to this pretty massive mistake.”

“I couldn’t really write about myself,” he said to the full house at The Actors’ Gang, “because as my wife told me, I’m not that interesting a character.”

Instead, Beinart, a New America Foundation fellow and journalist, wrote The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris — a study of how Americans have been seduced by success when it comes to foreign policy. In an event cosponsored by the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, Beinart sat down with The Atlantic literary and national editor Benjamin Schwarz to explore why the U.S. goes to war, why we do it wrong, and the future of American power.

Guy with a hammer

As Schwarz noted, the U.S. doesn’t necessarily use its power as other countries might. Beinart agreed. While the U.S.’s overestimation of strength is part of the “very old story of what Paul Kennedy has called ‘imperial overstretch,’” Beinart said, the U.S. also has a “missionary impulse,” an urge to export our style of government and economy to the rest of the world. But, he added, borrowing Francis Fukuyama’s formulation, when it comes to the question of spreading the American way, neoconservatives are something like Leninists, and Beinart is more of a Marxist. “Whether America can speed up the gears of history is something I’ve become more skeptical about,” Beinart said. “I do think that’s a terrific goal.”

Hubris happens when we get too good at using power, and start to think we have too much of it. Our long string of military successes makes us too confident, certain we can answer threats at low cost, and even with humanitarian benefit, as we did in Bosnia and Kosovo. Beinart cited those conflicts as essential to forming his initial pro-war position on Iraq, more so than the Gulf War. The Bosnia and Kosovo efforts also benefited from being primarily air wars fought with support from the region and from European allies.

With too much success, Beinart said, “You become like a guy with a hammer looking around for nails.” A failure, like Vietnam, will, on the other hand, bring back some inhibitions. “We didn’t go jaunting off into another Vietnam for a long period after Vietnam, even under Ronald Reagan, the great hawk, who was very, very cautious.”

War against what we call war

Iraq turned out to be quite unlike Bosnia and Kosovo. The U.S. faced a massive commitment of ground troops and money and few allies. “We don’t need European countries to win the war,” Beinart said, “but we need their wisdom to know whether its winnable or not. You may not need multiple doctors, but you may want second or third opinions to tell you whether the first doctor can do the job at all.” And in Afghanistan, he said,  the ground shifted beneath the Obama administration, as the war became more and more difficult to win. Beinart noted that “there’s clearly a struggle going on between Obama and Biden and people in the military” when it comes to war policy.

Today, Beinart said, American policy suffers because “our conversation about the terrorist threat is still stuck in September 11, 2001.” Our assumption then, he recalled, was that there would be many more 9/11s, and worse, requiring a “whatever it takes” response. But, Beinart said, such attacks haven’t repeated in the U.S., though our discussion about terrorism remains the same. Al Qaeda has failed to pull off the multiple simultaneous attacks it was known for, he said, and they rely more and more for their attacks on “one very poorly trained guy.”

What we call “wars” may be part of the problem as well, Beinart said in Q&A. “We’ve started to use the word ‘war’ as a national mobilization against something we don’t like,” he said. “In a country that had been bombed a lot, it’s unlikely anyone would talk about war in that kind of gung-ho and antiseptic a way.”

New analogies

Terrorism is also not an ideological threat in the way of fascism and communism, as the Bush administration seemed to believe. As Beinart noted, those were powerful political movements supported by governments and “many smart people” as being able to offer more for the world. “No one has ever really believed that about Taliban Afghanistan,” Beinart said. Those who do, he added, “hate America and they hate Israel and they hate their local governments.” The Bush administration also seemed to believe, Beinart said, in the lasting power and relevance of states vis-à-vis nonstate actors. Confronted with Al Qaeda and 9/11, Bush tried “cramming it into the crusty embed of a conventional war vision, in which you invaded some countries.” Beinart added, “For a lot of people in the Bush administration, they remembered the Cold War as a real war. The whole point of the Cold war is it didn’t get hot.”

In fact, poor analogies are a problem in general, Beinart noted in Q&A. U.S. policymakers operate on the Munich analogy — “give em an inch, they’ll take an arm,” Beinart said — or Vietnam, with nothing in between. Americans also won’t look to the experience of other powers, like the French, whose history might have warned us off both Vietnam and Iraq. Regional understanding helps too — our policy of deterrence in the Cold War, Beinart noted, came from a longtime student of Russia and a resident of its border regions, George Kennan.

No elephant in the room?

One way to get over hubris, of course, is not simply to fail, but to decline. “Will America recover as it did after World War I and Vietnam, or are we in a potential situation where we’re not going to have this problem again?” Beinart asked. But as Schwarz and Beinart both noted, American decline is predicted quite often. In the 1980s, many believed that Germany and Japan would surpass American power. In the 1930s, Beinart said, many thought the Soviet Union, fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany would beat us. “Panics about American decline, which we’ve had a lot of, are not a bad thing,” Beinart said. “Sometimes they force us to try to solve some of our problems.” Measuring decline also depends on “when you’re starting the history meter,” Beinart said. “If you compare everything to 1945, when pretty much everywhere else was on its knees, then it’s inevitable that America is in decline.” The same goes for the 1990s, Beinart said, when oil prices were low and China was only starting its rise.

But one thing that might need to recede is our military footprint, which, Beinart noted, has expanded dramatically since the end of the Cold War, when it would have been unimaginable for the U.S. to have a military presence on the ground in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, or to have such costly wars in the Middle East. A shrinking military presence doesn’t require the decline of American economic power, Beinart said. It could, in fact, help the economy. “We can start to rebuild the American economic model,” he said.

Such a retrenchment makes particular sense in an era of “quite remarkable” peace among powers, including between China and the U.S. Though China remains a threat, Beinart said — “human beings have shown a great willingness to do things that seem economically irriational because of considerations of pride, power, honor and nationalism” — this could be looked back on as an era when Americans could afford to focus on the second or third-rate powers. “Iran, Iraq, North Korea — the elephant in the room that’s not there,” Beinart said. “To screw up the metaphor.

Watch the video here.
Watch a highlight clip here.
See more photos here.
Buy the book here.
Read an excerpt here.
Read four other foreign policy experts’ thoughts on hubris here.
Read In The Green Room Q&As with Peter Beinart and Benjamin Schwarz.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

With his years of experience covering the White House, Jonathan Alter understands intimately the shortcomings of the instant news cycle.

“You need to wait a few weeks or months before people will talk,” he told the full house at the RAND Corporation.

Alter, author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One, revealed what he learned writing the “second draft” of history: the inside story on Obama’s successes, failures, and his even and sometimes alienating temperament.

Healthcare, not school uniforms

The biggest surprise for Alter as he wrote The Promise was discovering that Obama essentially pushed healthcare legislation alone. Vice President Joe Biden believed Americans would give Obama a pass if he didn’t tackle it in his first year. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told Alter he “begged the president not to do this,” and later suggested Obama only insure 10 million instead of 31 million people. Senior adviser David Axelrod thought Obama should tackle energy first which, Alter noted, “given the news, maybe he should have.” Council of Economic Advisers chair Christina Romer reminded Obama that Franklin Roosevelt waited two years before pushing social security.

When Alter asked Obama why he pursued healthcare, Obama said, “if we didn’t do it now, it wouldn’t have happened.” Obama knew he would lose a good chunk of public support, and some seats in Congress, as the party in the White House almost always does in midterm elections. But even when Democrat Martha Coakley lost the race for Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat to Scott Brown — which, Alter said, Obama knew would happen as soon as Coakley dared insult the “shrine” that is Fenway Park — Obama pushed for healthcare. As Obama said to Alter, in a hidden jab at Hillary Clinton, “I wasn’t sent here to do school uniforms.”

The healthcare bill ended up being the largest piece of social legislation in 45 years, and Alter pushed aside liberal concerns that it didn’t do enough. He compared comparing them to when liberals criticized social security as insuring too few seniors. “Roosevelt, like Obama, figured you gotta start somewhere,” Alter said.

Good cop, bad cop on Afghanistan

Obama has also been criticized by the left for his foreign policy in Afghanistan. Alter praised Obama’s measured and deliberate approach to crafting that policy — including 20 hours of meetings last fall, the longest deliberation since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Obama and Biden, he said, played “good cop bad cop,” and Hillary Clinton was on the side of the Pentagon, despite having a “generally good relationship with Obama.” She argued for a longer, open-ended counterinsurgency commitment. There was also a behind-the-scenes drama among top-level generals and the administration. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, for one, said he wouldn’t support the Obama-Biden plan — an instance of insubordination. While Alter admitted to having doubts about Obama’s ultimate decision — a “quick in, quick out” — he preferred his process to a nonexistent one: “In Vietnam and Iraq, they never surfaced the assumptions and key issues for debate. They slipped into war inch by inch by inch.”

Underappreciated stimulus

And while healthcare and war have had much of the spotlight, Alter said that “Obama’s stimulus is the least appreciated piece of legislation in recent history.” He noted that the law includes the biggest infrastructure, education, and energy bills in decades. It also included the biggest tax cut package since Reagan, an item Obama offered to Republicans in the front end of negations — “bad poker,” Alter said.

Obama also could have done more to leverage his power over banks in early 2009, Alter acknowledged. He rightly resisted the recommendations of some on the left to nationalize banks, preventing bank runs and saving trillions of dollars. “The liberals who wanted nationalization, they got slam-dunked by history,” Alter said in Q&A. And some of Obama’s economic achievements have gone underappreciated, Alter said. “The auto bailouts went much better than anybody had any reason to accept,” and Obama put 250,000 Americans to work in 2009, much like Roosevelt did in 1933. He also “stopped the bleeding” of job loss.

About BP

While all eyes are on Obama’s energy policy during the Gulf oil spill, Alter pointed to a little-known success. In Copenhagen, Alter said, Obama crashed a meeting of the leaders of developing nations India, China, Brazil and South Africa in an attempt to make public each country’s carbon emissions. As the Chinese environmental minister tried to shove Obama out, the president ignored him. And when the minister talked in Chinese to the Chinese premier — telling the interpreter only to translate “for internal use only” — Obama ignored him and said, “I’ll take that to mean we have an agreement.”

“China had to live with it,” Alter said.

But Obama hasn’t handled the public part of the BP spill as well as he could have, Alter said. While the administration paid close attention to the crisis early on, Obama didn’t demonstrate that to the public. “He was on the defense for six weeks — a terrible place for him to be politically.” His Oval Office speech did start to take the offensive, Alter said, finally making clear that BP would be paying for everything, and taking Lousiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s recommendation to build barrier islands.

Needing to be needy?

Analyzing the president’s successes and failures requires studying his unusually calm demeanor As Alter put it, Obama has a great private temperament — “he gets calmer when the situation gets worse.” He’s more authentic and psychologically healthy than most people, and especially more than politicians, Alter said. His decision-making isn’t based on emotion, something that served him well during the 2008 race with John McCain. He makes decisions quickly, unlike Bill Clinton, whom Alter said was sometimes called the “second-guesser-in-chief.” That said, as Alter noted in Q&A, “he has a weakness for experts….he needs to cut through the experts faster.”

Obama’s public temperament, Alter said, remains “a puzzle.” While Obama has said that the presidency is not a theater, Alter countered, “It’s always been a theater, it always will be a theater, and he hasn’t found the right key to connect to the American middle class.” Obama has a disdain for the sound bite, but as Alter noted, all the great presidential speeches have had sound bites. Without them, Alter said, “his speeches kind of become elegant fast food — they sound great but they wear off pretty quickly.” Alter added that Obama sometimes seems openly frustrated by the “stupidity” of the media. “He was just disgusted by the lack of seriousness,” Alter said. “That disgust isn’t going to take him anywhere. He needs to adjust to it and make sure that irritation doesn’t show through.”

And his cool temperament can be a hindrance even when he’s not in the public eye. As Alter explained, when other presidents, notably Bill Clinton, screamed at an employee, they followed with forgiveness. Alter noted when it happened to him — after he asked Clinton whether he was seeking “counseling for the Monica Lewinsky problem.” Clinton eventually calmed and later granted Alter his first post-presidency interview. “With Obama, he’s not yelling at you, but he’s not giving you that warm embrace,” Alter said. “You’re not always sure where you stand with him.”

It might have something to do with the fact that Obama is “not needy himself. He doesn’t quite understand that congressmen are really needy and the American public is really needy.”

Obama’s future

As Later said, he has no crystal ball for predicting the future of Obama’s administration. “The economy, Afghanistan, and the BP spill will determine his political fate going forward,” Alter said. And while the left has criticized him for what they see as shortcomings, Alter said many of Obama’s compromises are because “he doesn’t want to leave empty handed. It’s so hard for liberals to understand that he’s not into gestures. He’s not into making you feel good that he took the right position on something.”

He added, “There are a hundred ways for Obama to fail, but he’s a gifted individual and a more successful president than many acknowledge.”

Watch the video here.
Watch a highlight clip here.
See more photos here.
Read Jonathan Alter’s In The Green Room Q&A here.
Buy the book here.
Read an excerpt here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

Like most speakers, Wilbert Rideau began by telling the audience at the Skirball Cultural Center that he was glad to be there.

But, Rideau, who spent 44 years in Louisiana State Pententiary, added, “No one has ever meant it more than I do.”

Rideau, author of In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance, talked about his time running the country’s only uncensored prisoner-run publication, and explained why lifting censorship is the single most important prison reform.

Prison is hell

“Prison is hell, if by hell we mean a place of discord, brutality, and chaos, of always wanting and never having,” Rideau said, quickly adding, “Of course, it’s not meant to be a picnic.”

Rideau was sent to Angola after being convicted of murder and sentenced to death. “I did something very stupid,” Rideau said. “I thought I could solve all my problems in life by robbing a bank. It was the dumbest thing in my life, the darkest moment of my life, one which I will never stop regretting because somebody died.” Rideau, who had dropped out of school in 8^th grade, ended up facing an all-white jury with a pair of real estate lawyers who didn’t call any witnesses on his behalf or make a case. Rideau spent most of his life in Angola prison, long known as the most brutal maximum security prison in the country.

“It was a jungle in which the weak either perished or served the strong,” Rideau said. Rape and sexual enslavement were common and “enslavement brought a kind of order to the chaos.” Death happened with the tacit consent of the prison administration. At some point the consent was more than implied — prison authorities once gave guns to a few prisoners, all convicted murderers, and granted them the authority to shoot to kill, Rideau said. “Inmate-on-inmate violence was institutionalized.” From 1972 to 1975, he said, 67 inmates were stabbed to death while hundreds suffered wounds.

Rusty tomatoes

Though Angola has improved today, Rideau said, prison authorities across the country still fail to protect America’s two million inmates from abuse, rape and violence. The reason for this, Rideau argued, is secrecy — the lack of freedom for inmates and staff to talk about what’s going on in prison to those outside prison. “Our nation’s penal institutions are cloaked by official censorship,” he said. The usual justification for secrecy in prisons is security, though Rideau argued that there is no evidence that open expression makes prisons less secure.

For 20 years, while Rideau was at Angola, the prison lifted its censorship rules. Prisoners were allowed confidential mail communication with members of the mainstream press and government agencies, allowing any inmate to blow the whistle on abuse or wrongdoing without fear of reprisal. One prisoner, Rideau recalled, shut down a business that forced inmates to scrub rust off outdated cans of tomatoes headed to grocery stores. Any of Angola’s 5,000 prisoners or 2,000 employees could report such problems. It was, Rideau said, “what today might be called an oversight commission.”

The Angolite

In addition to free expression, Angola allowed a free press — The Angolite, a bimonthly news magazines staffed by self-taught inmate journalists. Staffers were allowed to publish any story as long as it was free of libel and slander, and could be verified. “This unique freedom didn’t spring from the breast of some progressive judge,” Rideau said. “This free press blossomed in the bowels of a monster.” Angola, then the toughest and most violent prison in the nation, was under court order requiring prison authorities to end rape, murder, and gang warfare in the prison.

Angola’s warden at the time, C. Paul Phelps, had admired Rideau’s writing and asked him to be editor of The Angolite, promising no censorship. “He changed my life and made possible everything good and productive that I was later able to do in prison,” Rideau said. Phelps thought a free press could do in prison what it did outside — be a credible source of information for everyone and delegitimize rumors. Phelps found secrecy — and the attitude of many prison employees that inmates don’t deserve explanations — counterproductive. “If you don’t have dentures or underwear to give an inmate, what’s wrong with telling him that?” Rideau said. “Telling him that you don’t have it to give, and that you’re not just being mean to him? That would be a plus.”

Telephoto

While lifting censorship was a bold move, Rideau said, “Freedom from censorship, whether inside prison or out, is meaningless if you don’t understand the forces that drive your world.” Rideau worked with Phelps to understand prison operations, even participating in staff meetings “to the surprise and dismay of some.” It was crucial, Rideau said, for getting a perspective deeper than that of either “the typical inmate who sees prison only through the narrow lens of his own pain” or the guard who has never been incarcerated.

Angolite staffers also had access to all records and data about the prison, except for sensitive security material and private information about prisoners or employees. They were given telephones, tape recorders, and cameras. When one employee complained that prisoners could take photos of employees “doing something that would embarrass the prison,” Rideau said, Phelps gave them telephoto lenses.

Staffers also had unfettered communication with news media and public officials. They could travel unshackled to other penal facilities, and travel with chaperones to cover criminal justice related events and conduct interviews. Though some balked at answering questions from prisoners, and though some fellow prisoners saw them as “sellouts”, Rideau said, eventually the magazine was a success. The magazine won many awards, entered curricula for prison training and university students, and branched into broadcast journalism. “We became so respected in our world that people wanted to be in The Angolite in much the same that people here might want to be in the Los Angeles Times,” Rideau said.

Walls, fences, towers

The Angolite brought clear improvements to the prison. It improved safety, dispelled rumors, and educated and humanized those who lived and worked inside. Employees and prisoners gained an understanding of each other. Thanks to The Angolite’s work, deaf inmates had access to interpreters, sick and elderly inmates were released, rape and enslavement were no longer seen as acceptable behavior, Louisiana’s prison medical care improved statewide, and the state switched its method of execution. “Our prison fences didn’t fall. The guard towers remained in place. And the absence of censorship caused no deaths, no escapes, and no disturbances during that 20 year period,” Rideau said. “The wall of censorship around this nation’s prisons, like so many other walls in the world, is unnecessary.”

If it were any other public institution, Rideau said, secrecy would not be tolerated. Where prisons are concerned “the news media and the public get distracted from official rhetoric that prisoners don’t have rights, or that some mysterious security need would be jeopardized.” But, Rideau argued, censorship improves prison security and operations, bringing accountability to the institution. “Unchecked, arbitrary power exercised in secret over a generally despised class of people is a recipe for abuse, brutality, and worse,” Rideau said.

Nice little ego trip

After the 20 years, a new warden shut down The Angolite. Shortly after, Rideau was released from prison. On a retrial, a mixed-race jury found him guilty only of manslaughter, for which he had more than twice served the time. He had no money and no place to stay when he was released. His time in the cell, Rideau said, “introduced me to the concept of reading just to kill time.”

He became a writer and speaker, arguing for lifting prison censorship as the best means to reform. He also spoke against keeping prisoners incarcerated too long — a costly and ineffective way to punish — and the lack of opportunity for inmates after their release, even those who are exonerated. “You bitch and moan about recidivism, but when a guy comes out, he has no way to earn money,” Rideau said. “Once they get desperate they resort to what they know best. Their whole attitude then is, ‘Hey, we enemies.’ You’re you and they’re them.”

“I’m not complaining,” Rideau said repeatedly, smiling. “You have to understand, I talk to lawyers. They got plenty of education. Here I am, 8^th grade,” he said. “It’s cool. It’s a nice little ego trip. And they listen to me too.”

Watch the video here.
Watch a highlight clip here.
See more photos here.
Read Rideau’s In The Green Room Q&A here.
Buy the book here.
Read an excerpt here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

The Hoover Dam wasn’t always known as the Hoover Dam.

As Michael Hiltzik, author of Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century, explained, the battle to name the dam spanned 20 years and several presidential administrations. Options included Boulder Canyon Dam or simply Boulder Dam, even though the dam was 20 miles downstream in Black Canyon. In 1947, a Republican-majority Congress voted to put Hoover’s name back on the Dam, prompting so much controversy that one frustrated Nevadan wrote in to his local paper suggesting the name, “Who Gives A Dam.”

“Why should we give a damn?” Hiltzik asked the crowd at the Autry National Center. Even decades later, he said, “There are lots of reasons.” Besides its stunning beauty and power, Hiltzik said, the Dam transformed — and still influences today — the American economy, the West, and the way we interact with nature.

Shovel-ready

The Great Depression, according to economist Alexander J. Field, was also the most technologically progressive decade of the 20th century. The Dam may have been the capstone, Hiltzik said, but the decade also saw the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, and the Pasadena Freeway, all groundbreaking additions to the national infrastructure with roots in local or regional requests. Each required a massive federal government investment — a dramatic departure from past federal budgets. Before 1930, Hiltzik explained, the average federal public works budget was $150 million. The Hoover Dam cost $165 million alone. “We should tip the hat to Herbert Hoover, who showed the way,” Hiltzik said.

The Dam also transformed the way the country addressed unemployment, which until the 1930s was long regarded as a city and state problem. By the start of the Depression, the 15 or 20 states that had unemployment programs were strapped for cash, and appealed to Hoover for help. Hoover tried to “jawbone” major industry executives to hold the line on wages and employment, Hiltzik said, but executives reneged on their promises. But Hoover also decided to step up government construction. “The call went out for what we today think of as shovel-ready projects.” The one project that was well along in design — signed into law by Calvin Coolidge — was the future Hoover Dam. Ten thousand men were put to work at four to six dollars a day, in conditions bad enough to spur the first-ever workers’ strike, as men died of heat stroke and carbon monoxide poisoning. As Hiltzik put it, it was “some of the most hellishly difficult and dangerous work in creation.”

The Great Flood

The story of the Dam starts long before the Great Depression, as Hiltzik noted. The Dam was conceived to address a Southern California emergency — the Great Flood of 1905, which inundated Imperial Valley. That region was already producing $2 billion a year in fruits and vegetables after marketers renamed it. “It’s very hard to attract people to raise crops in some place called the Colorado Desert,” Hiltzik joked. The flood inundated the valley, destroyed Calexico and Mexicali, and created the Salton Sea. Putting the river back to its normal path took two years and $3 million, courtesy the Southern Pacific Railroad. Theodore Roosevelt promised the company a repayment that never came, but pronounced in a landmark message that the Colorado had to be tamed, and that the only entity capable of doing it was the federal government.

Otis, Chandler, and Power

Political opposition blocked the dam for 20 years, Hiltzik said. The Los Angeles Times editorialized vehemently against it — the paper’s owners, Harrison G. Otis and his son-in-law Harry Chandler, knew it would shut off irrigation to 800,000 acres they owned in Baja California and Sonoma. The other major opponent — the private utility industry, then known as the power trust — wanted to protect itself from what it saw as a rising public power movement, especially after Los Angeles had seized Edison Company’s electric grid to create what we now know as the Department of Water and Power. The trust, Hiltzik said, went as far as to bribe Congress, pay college professors to rewrite history textbooks, and secretly sponsor municipal orders to kill public power programs. As Californians were still at the polls voting on a quite similar PG&E-sponsored proposition that night, Hiltzik said, “This should sound eerily familiar to you.”

But opposition quickly died down. “The power trust outsmarted itself,” Hiltzik said, and was exposed by the then-weak Federal Trade Commission. Hearings and leaked documents revealed the trust’s bribery, and Congress — particularly at the urging of California’s progressive Republican Senator Hiram Johnson — swung in favor of the Dam. More unexpectedly, Hiltzik said, the Los Angeles Times turned around. Chandler and Otis were bailing out of Mexico as a new government started seizing their land, and one William Mulholland “got Harry Chandler’s ears.”

Mulholland

Mulholland got involved in what was being called the Boulder Canyon Project in 1926, when funding wasn’t clearly available. The government knew that eventually hydroelectric power would sell, but the likeliest future buyer — Los Angeles — was 300 miles away, and then just a small city. Mulholland visited Congress and said, “Gentlemen, I’m going to inject a new element into your discussion.” Los Angeles was suffering from a devastating drought, he said, and needed all the water it could import. The city would build its own aqueduct that would require great energy to pump water over mountains. “Gentleman,” Hiltzik quoted Mulholland as saying, “We’ll buy every kilowatt.” Mulholland envisioned a big destiny for his city and promised to buy even more power than needed to pump the water. Back in L.A., he reminded Harry Chandler that his family’s future—  its newspaper and real estate holdings — was tied up in the future of the city, and so his support of the dam was essential. With the Dam’s two biggest foes defeated, Congress passed the project and Calvin Coolidge signed it into law in late 1928.

From Hoover to Kaiser

Work began on the Dam earlier than planned, in mid 1930. “Black Canyon rang with the sound of jackhammers and railroad cars and trucks and dynamite blasts 24 hours a day,” Hiltzik said, falling silent only on the Fourth of July and Christmas day. It was twice the height of any dam built to date, and required more concrete than all the other dams the U.S. government had ever built. Engineers had to invent new equipment, construction techniques, and types of concrete as they went along. A new technique of cooling concrete prevented the Dam from staying too hot. “Otherwise the Dam would still be cooling today, and for another hundred years,” Hiltzik said.

The first national lab in American history was built to house such innovation, and an entire test dam was made and destroyed. The builders who won the contracts became nationally famous tycoons — Henry Kaiser and Warren Bechtel. They charged workers a few dollars a month for medical care in a system that would eventually become Kaiser Permanente. Hundreds of thousands of Americans came to watch the Dam go up, as did engineering delegations from abroad. Twenty-nine more hydroelectric dams would be built as part of the Tennessee Valley Authority, including seven more on the Colorado River, tapering its once mighty flow to the Gulf.

Five years after work began, on September 30, 1935, Franklin Roosevelt came to the Dam, in 120 degree heat, to dedicate it before 10,000 spectators. Roosevelt knew its totemic power when he spoke of “the spell it would cast on every visitor.” Roosevelt dedicated the dam — conceived, approved, and launched by his Republican predecessors — in the name of the New Deal. “Well,” Hiltzik said, “he was a politician.”

Legacy

The Dam became a landmark achievement, reflected upon in times of crisis and at times of achievement — from the interstate highway system to the moon landing. The pattern of federal management and private enterprise would be repeated over and over, until today.  A million tourists visit it every year; movie directors and advertisers use it as a backdrop. The West relies on it, and Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Denver, and Salt Lake City would not have been possible without it. About 40% of Angelenos’ water comes thanks to the Hoover Dam.

The Dam has a darker legacy as well, Hiltzik said. The trickle of water granted Mexico — with which the U.S. had no treaty governing water rights when the Dam was built — remains a sticking point in foreign relations with the country. Lake Mead is far below its usual level, a symbol, Hiltzik said, of “how we sometimes allow technology to promise us too much, how we sometimes forget that everything has its limit.” Even in 1893, Hiltzik said, one explorer with knowledge of the Colorado announced at an irrigation conference, “You are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights.” Even the Colorado River couldn’t answer all that demand, Hiltzik said — of farmers who planted the thirstiest crops, of cities that sprawled, of fishermen who thought they could fish forever, of homeowners who water their lawns daily. “Now we’re in the era of limits,” Hiltzik said, and even so, people want more dams, “as if you can create water where there isn’t any.”

Watch the video here.
Watch a highlight clip here.
See more photos here.
Read Hiltzik’s In The Green Room Q&A here.
Buy the book here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

Besides being dream destinations for immigrants and global centers of finance, Zurich and Los Angeles share the unusual distinction of being de facto capitols of the world’s leading laboratories of direct democracy. As journalist Joe Mathews explained, Switzerland and California use citizens’ initiatives and referenda more often and with more force than anywhere else in the world. Although, he added, “Oregonians have some argument there.”

In an event co-presented by the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and in collaboration with the Consulate General of Switzerland, Mathews joined Swiss National Parliament member Andreas Gross, Swiss journalist Bruno Kaufmann, attorney George Kieffer, who led the 1999 Los Angeles Charter revision, and California Common Cause Executive Director Kathay Feng to consider the systems of democracy in each place, who does it better, and what exactly democracy means.

Safety valves

California and Switzerland both employ initiatives and referenda — that is, citizens’ efforts aimed at either launching a law or reversing a legislative act — but in vastly different political and cultural atmospheres, the panelists noted. As Gross explained, in the 19th century, Switzerland realized that electing a parliament alone does not a democracy make. “The basic line of democracy is that life is not destiny. You have instruments where you can influence your existence,” he said. Between elections, the Swiss wanted instruments to influence the decision-making process directly.Votes on initiatives occur on different days from votes on representatives, and initiatives require a long period of public debate before the vote. As Kaufmann said, “Debate before decision-making is key to democracy. Otherwise, there’s no difference from a dictatorship.”

California’s reforms came at the turn of the 20th century, when railroad interests seemed to hold too much power in the budding state, Feng said. The progressive movement led by Hiram Johnson looked at Switzerland for a “safety valve for voters, when we feel our government is not being responsive.” Feng noted that the initiative process does still work this way in some cases, as with California’s latest redistricting reform — legislators had little interest in shifting districts designed to keep them in office. “Not just because I wrote it, but it is one of the examples where you do want to use direct democracy,” Feng said.

Litmus tests and TV ads

But the problems of California’s initiative process are well-known, the panelists noted. Feng said that the influence of money is the biggest challenge, along with the number of initiatives placed on the ballot. “It becomes a real money race,” she said. Those with money have the best chance of getting something on the ballot, and television ads replaced deliberation, decision-making, and the dissemination of real information. As Gross said, “I don’t understand why you only have entertainment.” While Feng praised what she called “a very robust system of campaign disclosures,” she argued that initiatives are so complex that we vote based not on information but rather on a “litmus test” of whether we like the funder or not.

Kieffer noted that the problem goes beyond California, and involves the difference between American and Swiss political cultures. “We equate, constitutionally, money with free speech,” he said. Whereas Switzerland doesn’t allow TV ads for campaigns, some in the U.S. would consider it unconstitutional, even immoral to ban them. “It tells you how these systems can grow up so differently,” Kieffer said. Gross agreed about the different cultures, noting that California and Switzerland have different relationships between legislatures and people. “The Swiss state has not so much power. A lot of power is still in civil society.” In fact, he noted, the Swiss can’t spend more than $9 million of public money without consent of the people.

But as Kaufmann pointed out, both countries face a common challenge of a diminishing press, which means less information on initiatives for the public. Feng and Kieffer both pointed out how much the media landscape has changed in the U.S. — particular channels talk to viewers of a particular political opinion; candidates sit out debates because they can create specially tailored forums for conversation; and initiative supporters reach out to narrow slivers of likely voters who aren’t often representative of the broader electorate. As Kaufmann said, with media talking to narrow portions of the population, “We are living in societies were public spheres are very fragmented.”

Too much democracy?

An unexpected problem of American political culture, Kieffer noted is “too much democracy” — particularly when it comes to transparency. Holding meetings in public can be contrary to building consensus, he said. Gross agreed, but said, “I would say you have too much publicity, not too much democracy. Too much publicity does not lead to more democracy.” Closed doors are crucial because “you have to have the right to make a mistake,” he said. Otherwise, “You’re playing a role. You’re an actor.”

But as Feng noted, after the Nixon administration, Americans demanded more openness in government. And since the lobbying scandals of last decade, Americans have wanted still more disclosure and regulation of campaign contributions. But she admitted that Gross had a point. “If people feel they are performing for a camera or an audience, they can’t speak as faithfully or look for resolutions in as nuanced a way as they might,” she said. A compromise might be found, she suggested, in recording proceedings for release at a later point — common practice for presidential tapes. Gross also admitted that Switzerland could use more disclosure of financing behind particular positions.

Fixes?

The panelists suggested a few more changes for their respective homes. Gross suggested that Switzerland consider letting more people vote, including the roughly one in four Swiss who are not citizens. He also advocated for public funding of newspapers since “the market is not paying any more for quality newspapers,” and something like the U.S.’s former Fairness Doctrine for Switzerland, which mandates equal broadcast time for different political positions.

Kaufman noted that Europe is considering a union-level initiative process. To that, Kieffer responded, “If you go in that direction, talk to us.” He added, “Don’t let money into that system. If you think it’s bad with the representatives, it is so easy to spend money and move the public.”

California could consider Switzerland’s more measured initiative system, including longer and more public debates and letting government respond to initiatives before the vote. Feng noted that there is an effort in California to let the courts decide on the constitutionality of an initiative before the vote, particularly where civil rights are concerned. She added that some Californians also support a quorum, though she does not necessarily agree. A quorum would require a certain percent of voters to vote on an effort, otherwise it doesn’t count.

But quorums ultimately undermine democracy, Kaufmann argued. “The nonvoters are always winning.”

Watch the video here.
Watch a highlight clip here.
See more photos here.
Read In The Green Room Q&As with the panelists: Andreas Gross, Kathay Feng, Bruno Kaufmann, George Kieffer, and Joe Mathews.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.