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California/The West

LAPL ID: 
19

The Union of their Dreams: Power, Hope and Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker Movement

In conversation with Jim Newton, Editor-at-Large, LA Times
Thursday, March 4, 2010
01:01:50
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Episode Summary

Drawing on a trove of original documents, tapes, and interviews to chronicle the rise of the United Farm Workers during the heady days of civil rights struggles, the antiwar movement, and 60s and 70s student activism, Pawel weaves together a powerful portrait of a people and their movement.


Participant(s) Bio

Miriam Pawel is the author of The Union of Their Dreams - Power, Hope and Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker Movement a groundbreaking narrative history told through eight participants in the movement. She spent 25 years as an award-winning reporter and editor on both coasts, directing coverage that won Pulitzer prizes at Newsday for the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 and at the Los Angeles Times for the deadly 2003 wildfires. In 2006, she wrote a four-part investigative series for the Times about the United Farm Workers, which led her to delve more deeply into the history of Chavez's movement. She has recently been a fellow at the Alicia Patterson Foundation and a John Jacobs fellow at the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.


How Many Billboards? Visual Rights to the City

Moderated by curator Anne Bray, Executive Director, Freewaves
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
01:31:53
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Episode Summary
A panel of outdoor media professionals and legal experts focus on the city's recent debate surrounding LED billboards and illegal signage, raising the notion of free speech as it relates to images on the street along the way. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition \"How Many Billboards? Art In Stead\" at The MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, Feb. 5 - March 12, 2010.

Participant(s) Bio
Toby Miller is Professor of Media & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. His teaching and research cover the media, sport, labor, gender, race, citizenship, politics, and cultural policy. Toby is the author and editor of over 30 volumes, and has published essays in well over 100 journals and books. His work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, Spanish, and German. He has made many appearances in the print and electronic media and previously worked in broadcasting, banking, and politics, and at NYU. His latest books are Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age, 2007<; Makeover Nation: The United States of Reinvention, 2008; The Contemporary Hollywood Reader, 2009; and Television Studies: The Basics, 2010. http://greencitizenship.blogspot.com/

A Member of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA) Hall of Fame, Rick Robinson is a long time OOH Media advocate, creative consultant, public speaker, fine artist, teacher and writer. His 23 years in the business have included stints as a local salesperson for Ackerley Airport Advertising SF, Business Development Manager for Gannett Outdoor SF & LA, and National Creative Director at Outdoor Systems & Infinity Outdoor for several years until he opened up MacDonald Media's LA office in July of 2001. New York based MacDonald Media plans and buys OOH for Nike, Converse, EA Games, ESPN, J&J, AEG/Goldenvoice, and many others. Rick's industry achievements include helping launch the now renowned Tall Walls on The Sunset Strip, serving as a 2 time Obie Judge, Founding Chairman of the OAAA Creative Committee, and as Creative Director for the award winning "Big Boy" Power 106 Radio campaign.

Award-winning journalist Christine Pelisek covers government and crime for LA Weekly, where her in-depth investigations of topics ranging from the city's billboard wars to the use of DNA to track serial killers have won her acclaim. Last year, Pelisek won a Los Angeles Press Club Award for her powerful 2008 cover story "Billboards Gone Wild." Her story delved into the back room deal brokered by Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo and billboard giants CBS Outdoor, Clear Channel and Regency - a lucrative settlement deal that gave the billboard giants the right to "digitally modernize" more than 800 traditional billboards in Los Angeles without a single public hearing or zoning debate. Last year, a Superior Court judge ruled the settlement deal invalid. Pelisek has been covering the billboard wars in Los Angeles since 2008 and has written countless stories and blog posts on the subject.

John Tehranian is an attorney, academic and author. He is a partner at One LLP, an entertainment and intellectual property litigation firm in Southern California, and is a tenured Professor of Law at Chapman University, School of Law, where he also serves as Director of the Entertainment Law Center. He has previously served as Professor of Law at the University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law, and as Visiting Professor of Law at Loyola Law School. A graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, he is the author of numerous works on the interface between law and culture, with a particular focus on issues of intellectual property, entertainment, civil rights and race. He is the author of the book Whitewashed, an analysis of the social and legal construction of race, and the forthcoming book Infringement Nation, an examination of copyright law in the digital age.

Anne Bray has been working at the intersection of public art and media art since the mid '70s as an artist, art teacher and curator. She is an artist, teacher and Director of Freewaves, a media arts organization and festival in Los Angeles. She developed the concept of the multicultural network of media artists and venues in 1989 and has continued to see the organization through the technological, social and aesthetic changes of the 1990s to now. As an artist she exhibits her work as temporary installations in public sites and art venues combining personal and social positions via video, audio, stills and 3-d screens at gas stations, malls, movie theaters, on TV, in department stores, and on billboards. She teaches public art and multimedia at Claremont Graduate University and USC.

From the Barrio to the 'Burbs: Crossing Borders & Finding Home in the New Los Angeles

In conversation with Father Gregory J. Boyle, S.J., Homeboy Industries
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
01:02:03
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Episode Summary
In his remarkable and ambitious new memoir, The Opposite Field, Katz tells a story of good love and failed love, of Los Angeles and Portland and Nicaragua and Mexico and a father and son in search of a place to play baseball.

Participant(s) Bio
Jesse Katz has been writing about Los Angeles for the better part of three decades, first as a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, then as a senior writer at Los Angeles magazine. In his fifteen years at the L.A. Times, Jesse shared in two Pulitzer Prizes and was a Pulitzer finalist for beat reporting. In nine years at Los Angeles, he received the PEN Center USA's literary journalism award and the James Beard Foundation's M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. He was also a National Magazine Award nominee. His articles have been reprinted in The Best American Magazine Writing and The Best American Crime Writing. He has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, Details, Rolling Stone, Texas Monthly, and Food & Wine. He teaches in the literary journalism program at UC Irvine, and he has volunteered in the juvenile justice system through a program called InsideOUT Writers.

A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler's Emigres and Exiles in Southern California

In conversation with conductor/composer William Kraft
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
01:06:13
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Episode Summary
Crawford, a musicologist, reveals the uniquely vibrant era when Southern California became a hub of unprecedented musical talent.

Participant(s) Bio
Dorothy Lamb Crawford has lived and worked in music throughout her career, teaching and lecturing, performing as a singer, directing opera, and hosting broadcast interviews with musicians. She is author of Evenings On and Off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939-1971 and(with John C. Crawford) Expressionism in Twentieth-Century Music.

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