We start this episode of Hear in the City at Los Angeles' historic Echo Park Lake, the site of a $65 million water quality project that has temporarily displaced dozens of birds and turned the ponds of lotus flower into a giant construction site. From there, we follow the ducks and geese to their new home in Mac Arthur Park where we catch catfish in the middle of the city and finally find a free lunch at Langer's Deli in honor of their 65th anniversary.
Jun 21, 2012•28 min
On this episode of Hear in the City we visit with two extraordinary people who dedicate their lives to caring for pets who would otherwise fall through the cracks of the urban economic crisis. One, a veterinarian and self-proclaimed "bleeding heart", is owed $40,000 by the City of Los Angeles Department of Animal Services. The other, a computer scientist who feed feral cats by night, is an unusual creature on the streets of L.A.: a walker, a veritable flaneur.
Jun 13, 2012•28 min
On today’s Hear in the City, in honor of Mothers’ Day, we offer you two stories of motherhood during difficult times... The first is an audio postcard from a group of teen moms who are finishing their high school degrees at a small school in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. The second story is an inquiry into a mother’s journey across landscapes of occupation as she tries to keep her children safe across changing borders at a time of war.
May 08, 2012•28 min
It's our May Day show. Studs Terkel, Lenin's Head by the Gao Brothers, Pete Seeger, The East is Red, and the connections between the immigrant rights movement and the 99%. From Los Angeles as the marches get underway. (photo credit, LA Times).
May 02, 2012•27 min
Martha White interviewed her friend Jessica Chapin at Santa Monica's Step Up on Second, a psychosocial rehabilitation and support program for people affected by severe and persistent mental illness. Jessica is a resident in the organization's permanent supportive housing and Martha is a member in the supportive services programs. Martha and Jessica sat down to interview each other about what the program has helped them accomplish in life. Their interview was produced by Will Coley and Sara Harri...
Apr 30, 2012•3 min
This week's Hear in the City offers you a sonic journey into translations between languages, media, and landscapes as we map an eclectic sampling of Mexican artists whose work is currently featured around Los Angeles.
Apr 25, 2012•29 min
Anne Marie Ruff who recently published her first novel, Through These Veins, explores the question “if we had a cure for AIDS, would it ever make it to market?:” She spent a lot of time at the Los Angeles Central Library while writing and offers us this audio post-card to the Central Library. All profits from the sale of her book benefit Doctors Without Borders and the Ethiopian Institute for the Conservation of Biodiversity. Her commentary was originally published in the Downtown News. Anne Mar...
Mar 27, 2012•5 min
On this week's episode: Walmart makes inroads to Los Angeles via Chinatown and the Los Angeles Central Library is a home away from home, with author Anne Marie Ruff.
Mar 27, 2012•30 min
Before this week's show, Hear in the City host Sara Harris will be presenting her work at the Center for Non-profit Management and talking about the ins-and-outs of independent radio/audio production. One of Sara's all-time-favorite stories she's worked on is this collaboration with Street Poet Jorge Nuñez. After growing up his whole life in Los Angeles, Jorge was deported to Tijuana, Mexico and tells this story about his experience. This piece was produced for Youth Radio and originally aired o...
Mar 19, 2012•5 min
This is an excerpt from an audiopostcard Hear in the City host Sara Harris produced with Haitian students at Toussaint L'ouverture High School in Del Rey Beach, Florida after President Jean Bertrand Aristide was pushed out of power. An English teacher at the High School invited Sara to her poetry class. Her students wanted to challenge the pervasive impression that their country and their culture is one of misery, suffering, and disaster. So, together, they recorded their poetry and their choir ...
Mar 19, 2012•1 min
"Our vibrations reach Japan today." Spoken by Mineo Hoshi of the South Coast Interfaith Council in Los Angeles's Little Tokyo on the moment of ringing the bell at Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, 2:46PM, PDT, in honor of what was lost in the Tsunami one year ago.
Mar 14, 2012•8 min
On this week's episode, we ring the big bell at the Nishi Honganji Buddhist Temple in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles at 2:46pm in recognition and solidarity with the people of Japan who were hit by the earthquake and Tsunami last year. We also visit an unusual architectural landscape of courtrooms and social services dedicated to children who have become wards of the foster care system.
Mar 13, 2012•29 min
At the beginning of the year, Hear in the City was selected by the national youth radio network --Generation PRX-- to participate in a one-hour radio special about bullying. This episode of Hear in the City features two wonderfully talented students at Roosevelt High School, Oscar Rodriguez and René Ayala, reporting about how bullying is not as easily defined as you might think. Also features music by EMA and They Live, Midnight Ridazz, #99!
Mar 06, 2012•29 min
We spend this week's show at a one-time musical happening that takes space in a motel on Colorado Boulevard where the rooms are converted into experimental music stages and installation spaces for an afternoon. Arts editor Jesse Lerner condenses a 6 hour sound fest by the Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound into our half-hour radio show. If you like Ornette Coleman, Kamou Daaood, and John Cage, you don't want to miss this episode of Hear in the City!
Feb 02, 2012•29 min
On this episode, we take an eclectic tour of Los Angeles-based music. First, we go to a private collection that is open to the public...and houses the king of keyboards. After that, we’ll check in with Los Angeles Film forum about upcoming screenings of works that served as visual sisters to the punk rock scene in the city. At the end of the show, we go to Venice Beach with a Mariachi odd couple from Boyle Heights as they try to expand their territory.
Jan 12, 2012•29 min
It’s our first show of the new year! We’ll go to the Rose Parade to hear the first Occupy Los Angeles march of the year...and we’ll go up above Hollywood Boulevard at the Barnsdall Art Park for "Civic Virtue", an exhibition that deals with the ambivalent relationship between city government and the arts.
Jan 03, 2012•29 min
On this week's episode, we hang out with founders and fans of independent film gem, the Echo Park Film Center on the occasion of their 10th anniversary, and we review some lesser known work of a yellow press stalwart from 1940’s New York and L.A. Plus, a coda from the Baldwin Hills.
Dec 23, 2011•29 min
“It’s really hard for someone to get their head around what the Inglewood Oil Field is.” On this week’s Hear in the City we offer you part two in our series about oil extraction in the Baldwin Hills, and we help L.A. local-global micro cinema, the Echo Park Film Center, celebrate it’s 10th anniversary. Listen to KPFK, 90.7FM, Tuesday's at 3:30pm.
Dec 13, 2011•29 min
Here's a little taste of what we'll be delving into next week on Hear in the City for part 2 of our Air Check series from Baldwin Hills. Listen on Tuesday, December 13th at 3:30pm in Los Angeles on 90.7fm or at www.kpfk.org to hear the whole story about the oil fields in the middle of the city and what dangers they pose to people.
Dec 08, 2011•1 min
Hear in the City will spend then next few shows in the Baldwin Hills at the Inglewood Oilfield. This place is perched on the summit overlooking the past and the future. On one side, the oil discoveries that drew wealth and intrigue and prospectors to L.A. at the turn of the last century and on the other side, the future of Los Angeles parkland at a moment when public access to the great outdoors may well trump the desire for traditional industrial jobs and big real estate developments. To a degr...
Nov 16, 2011•29 min
This month, we’ll be launching our new series on oil exploration and drilling right in the middle of residential Los Angeles. It’s called Air Check: pollution and petroleum from a community perspective. It’s complicated. It involves oil rigs in the middle of the city, and it involves multiple agencies. You are welcome you to visit our website, www.hearinthecity.org to get a taste of who we’ll be hearing from in our reporting. Today, we wanted to follow up on an international story we've been cov...
Nov 10, 2011•29 min
Peace and equality activists of all stripes have been on the lawn and sidewalks of Los Angeles City Hall since the beginning of October as part of a larger sit-in movement in the United States demanding a restoration of sanity in economic and social systems in this country. It's peaceful, it's messy, it's full of ideas and dreams and conversations. Hear in the City listens in live, for the record. Listen up to the second half of the show. We'll have more as time goes by.
Nov 03, 2011•28 min
Peace and equality activists of all stripes have been on the lawn and sidewalks of Los Angeles City Hall since the beginning of October as part of a larger sit-in movement in the United States demanding a restoration of sanity in economic and social systems in this country. It's peaceful, it's messy, it's full of ideas and dreams and conversations. Hear in the City listens in live, for the record. Listen up. We'll have more as time goes by.
Nov 02, 2011•18 min
In honor of our one-year anniversary on Hear in the City, we bring you a show about protest, performance, and prayer in the public space. Our show is dedicated to mapping the city through conversations with people working toward creative social change in and around Los Angeles, and in that spirit, we are checking in with Occupy L.A., the Asco show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the World Festival of Sacred Music.
Oct 05, 2011•28 min
On this week's episode, we offer a mixed bag of art and culture happening around Los Angeles. Luis Sierra Campos visits a community garden in Highland Park that serves as a model for urban sustainability and food security in a depressed real estate market, Jesse Lerner reviews the Cuban photography show at the Getty, and Patrick Miller invites us to preview a group of musicians who will use their bicycles as improvisational instrument sin the upcoming Tour da Arts festival.
Aug 10, 2011•28 min
From our recent grocery shopping show on Hear in the City, we bring you contributor Will Coley's audio essay on why he likes Costco so much, "warts and all". The warehouse store chain has proven to weather the recession well, perhaps by not accepting credit cards other than American Express, but Will asked recently, "Can I take back my Costco love?" when he read about the company's agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to screen employees with the E-verify system for legal immigrati...
Aug 04, 2011•7 min
On past episodes of Hear in the City, we’ve covered the rich history of muralism in Los Angeles from the censorship angle to recent museum shows on the topic. This week, senior producer Luis Sierra Campos takes us on a walk along the cement channels that serve as the canvas for Los Angeles’s Great Mural on the Tujunga Wash of the L.A. River. The mural, painted in 1976 by more than 400 high school students and artists, is being restored this year under the guidance of SPARC (social and public art...
Aug 02, 2011•28 min
On this episode of Hear in the City, we get down to the nitty gritty of a brand new city ordinance protecting bicyclists from harassment by drivers in Los Angeles with Sergeant David Krumer, the bicycle liason at the LAPD, and we preview the quirky animations of independent filmmaker Jodie Mack before the screening at L.A. Film Forum this Sunday.
Jul 27, 2011•28 min
On this episode of Hear in the City, we go to the market. We sit down at the kitchen table with a 32 year veteran employee of the largest grocery chain the U.S. at a moment when the United Food and Commercial Workers union has approved a walk out if workers' demands are not met...and we hear confessions of a Costco cardholder about why he loves the sense of community that comes from being part of an elite club of deal-gatherers who frequent one of the few recession-proof companies.
Jul 21, 2011•29 min
Last month, on a Wednesday night at eight, the Million Dollar Theater on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles was packed for the 30th anniversary screening of a now classic film, Zoot Suit. On this episode of Hear in the City, we sit in on the panel discussion with iconic playwright and director, Luis Valdez, academy-award-nominee Edward James Olmos, and long-time film and television actor, Rose Portillo as they screen the film that changed all of their careers when it made its way -as a play- to Br...
Jul 13, 2011•28 min
