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Life & Times Transcript

11/14/07

Announcer>> Coverage of Town Hall Los Angeles speakers on Life and Times is made possible by a grant from the Boeing Company.

Announcer>> Tonight on Life and Times --

It's British and has a catchy name, but why all the buzz about a new supermarket?

Tim Mason>> "Our appeal is not around affluence. It's not around your social class. Our appeal is around fresh foods, less processed foods, affordable foods."

Announcer>> And then, you always knew it was cool to live in southern California, but did you know cool was born in southern California?

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> This month, ten new grocery stores are opening up across southern California. They're called Fresh & Easy and the company behind them is a British firm named Tesco. Now initially, the new stores were supposed to go into low income neighborhoods, but as it turned out, only two out of the ten are in low income areas and none at all are in South Los Angeles which needs grocery stores the most. Toni Guinyard takes a closer look at the new chain called Fresh & Easy.

Toni Guinyard>> It's Britain's latest import to the United States, new grocery stores called Fresh & Easy opening up in southern California. Grocery stores are a competitive business, but Fresh & Easy has done its research.

Simon Uwins>> The first thing to be said is that we've done a good deal of that research going into peoples' homes, into all different types of homes in all different types of neighborhoods.

Toni Guinyard>> Simon Uwins is Chief Marketing Officer for the Fresh & Easy grocery store chain. They're taking shape across southern California's landscape from Los Angeles to San Diego. It's taken years to reach this point and the markets are making news in part because of the company's approach to doing business.

Simon Uwins>> You talk to people and find out what it is they want as customers from grocery shops or from grocery shopping and then what we do is try and design a store from there that meets that better than anybody else.

Toni Guinyard>> Successful British retail giant, Tesco, is the company behind the Fresh & Easy brand.

Robert Gottlieb>> Tesco is a big global player. It's the third largest in the world. It operates in twelve countries. It has a third of the market in Great Britain and, coming to the United States, it sees itself as becoming the biggest food retailer in the United States.

Toni Guinyard>> Robert Gottlieb is Director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College. He says that Tesco has promised to put stores in areas that need the most.

Robert Gottlieb>> They've made strong promises about building stores in what they call food desert communities, low income communities that don't have a full-service supermarket close by.

Tim Mason>> "Our search has been much broader than most businesses when looking to break into a market."

Toni Guinyard>> Fresh & Easy CEO, Tim Mason.

Tim Mason>> "And that has taken us back into some of the neighborhoods that have traditionally been under-served."

Toni Guinyard>> At a press conference to announce the locations of twelve Los Angeles area markets, Mason explained the company's interest in going into so-called food desert communities.

Tim Mason>> "Our appeal is not around affluence. It's not around your social class. Our appeal is around fresh foods, less processed foods, affordable foods and easy to prepare and convenient."

Nelson>> That's a good day for us. It doesn't matter if they come from another country. It doesn't matter to me. If they're going to have lower prices and the same product or some even better, why can't we do that too?

Toni Guinyard>> Fresh & Easy hopes to open a market at the intersection of Jefferson and Crenshaw, so we went there to talk to residents about grocery shopping and what's available to them now.

Juanita Barnes>> There the prices are high (laughter) and the variety is short, so all of that is kind of bad.

Toni Guinyard>> Compared to what they want.

Simon Uwins>> They wanted fresh, wholesome food that's affordable and they didn't feel that, at the moment, they could get it at a level of price that they could afford.

Odessa Webb>> Oh, definitely, definitely, because I'm trying to eat better, you know, get more fruits and vegetables in my diet. So it's something definitely I would be interested in.

Toni Guinyard>> The Urban and Environmental Policy Institute is also interested in the Fresh & Easy chain. Last August, they issued a report called Shopping for a Market evaluating Tesco's entry into Los Angeles and the United States.

Amanda Shaffer>> Tesco's main goal, like any company, is to make money and we need to remember that that really is their underlying motivator.

Toni Guinyard>> Lead researcher, Amanda Shaffer.

Amanda Shaffer>> It's a good thing that Tesco is going into those neighborhoods and we want them to. We've wanted all of the chains to go into under-served neighborhoods for a long time.

Robert Gottlieb>> In the food access issue, we've discovered that, for the first hundred stores that they plan to roll out in the next year, only ten of them are in high poverty, low income areas and, of those ten, only three are stores that don't have full-service supermarkets close by.

Toni Guinyard>> Locally in southern California, few of the new Fresh & Easy stores opening this month are in working class neighborhoods. An earlier study by Occidental College showed that three-fourths of the new stores are in areas with higher than average incomes. And what about South Los Angeles? So far, no new Fresh & Easy, but Tesco officials say that they're working with real estate agents looking for the right locations.

Tim Mason>> "Central and Adams, as I mentioned, Broadway and Manchester Avenue, Pico Boulevard and San Vicente."

Toni Guinyard>> There are other issues that Tesco will be judged by as well, namely hiring practices.

Amanda Shaffer>> A lot of the press coverage has been on their desire to enter into these under-served areas and we don't want people to lose sight of the other issues that we've talked about in terms of labor and the environment and the supply chain.

Robert Gottlieb>> We think hiring locally is really important and it's an important promise that Tesco has made.

Amanda Shaffer>> It's also important to look at the big picture of what kind of jobs those stores are going to provide, and I think the people in those communities care about that just as much as they care about having access to healthy food.

Toni Guinyard>> So you'll actively recruit those people in that surrounding area?

Simon Uwins>> Absolutely, yes. That's exactly what we'll do. I mean, every store will actually be having job fairs before the stores open at that store or, if we can't put that at the store, nearby to recruit people from that neighborhood.

Toni Guinyard>> And they'll be offered jobs paying a minimum of ten dollars an hour while working a minimum of twenty hours a week.

Simon Uwins>> No job being less than twenty hours a week and every job over twenty hours a week will be offered affordable and broad health care with us paying at least seventy-five percent of the cost and with only ninety days qualification period both for the employee and for their family.

Robert Gottlieb>> The problem with a part-time workforce is that you then can't make a living wage unless you're juggling other jobs.

Toni Guinyard>> But they're saying starting at ten dollars an hour and that's higher than the minimum wage.

Robert Gottlieb>> It's higher than the minimum wage, but if you translate that into twenty hours a week, that's two hundred dollars a week. That's not a living wage for someone.

Toni Guinyard>> Expect the criticism to continue, but even the critics admit that they want the neighborhood markets to succeed for the sake of the community. But they also want to make sure Fresh & Easy lives up to its promises.

Simon Uwins>> If we do the right things for customers, and if we do the right things to employees, then we'll be fine. We'll be successful and we'll be having another great chat in a few month's time.

Toni Guinyard>> In the meantime, we'll be watching and waiting for more details about Fresh & Easy to be made public and for the public to decide if the neighborhood markets can live up to the hype. I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> If the Fresh & Easy stores in southern California turn out to be a success, Tesco plans to open many more throughout California, Nevada and Arizona.

So what do you think of Fresh & Easy? We'd love to know your opinion. Just go to our blog at kcet.org/lifeandtimes/blog.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> He sat in the anchor seat at NBC for twenty-one years. Tom Brokaw was raised in a small town in South Dakota, but he went on to become one of America's premier television journalists. His book, "The Greatest Generation", was a bestseller and now he's got a new book about the sixties.

It's called "Boom! Voices of the Sixties". Brokaw draws from the personal experiences of more than fifty Americans of every color, gender and background. Brokaw started out as a young reporter in the sixties and had a front row seat to this defining decade in American history. I asked him how time has changed our perception of the sixties.

Tom Brokaw>> What people forget about the sixties is that it was all-encompassing. Most folks think it really only addressed the Flower Children, so to speak, or the anti-war demonstrators, but it also was the decade through which people who went to Vietnam lived.

People who are on the far right as well as on the far left experienced the sixties. I wanted to make that clear to everyone that it was a much more complex decade than a lot of people I think now remember.

Val Zavala>> And you have an amazing range of people -- Karl Rove, James Taylor, Dick Gregory, Gloria Steinem, Jane Pauley, Delores Huerta. Did any of these people really surprise you?

Tom Brokaw>> I can't say that I was surprised. I think what I have been impressed with are two things. One is that a lot of the activists from the time now have a more honest evaluation of the mistakes that they made and they want to pass those lessons along to another generation.

To sum it up, I suppose most of them felt that they had tactics, but no strategy. They were very good at organizing things, but they weren't very good at following through.

Val Zavala>> Well, exactly. That's why I was interested in seeing Karl Rove. He was in here.

Tom Brokaw>> He was in high school in 1968. He was keenly aware of the election of 1968. He would go down to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in Salt Lake City and hear Bobby Kennedy --

Val Zavala>> -- who he admired very much.

Tom Brokaw>> He admired him because he was iconoclastic. He was a guy who said, you know, if you got a student deferment, it's wrong because that means working class kids go and you don't go. He liked Nelson Rockefeller who was a moderate Republican because he was in favor of a voluntary Army. He was intrigued by the demagoguery of George Wallace. So, yeah, Karl Rove is another person who went through the sixties.

Val Zavala>> And, of course, we can't miss the parallels. In the sixties, we had a very unpopular war that seemed to have no end. Now we're in Iraq, a very unpopular war, and we seem to be caught in the quagmire. But why do you think in the sixties people took to the streets by the millions to demonstrate against it and that's not happening today?

Tom Brokaw>> I think the draft has a lot to do with it. A lot of the so-called moral outrage at the time, which was genuine I think on the part of the people, went away when they realized that they weren't going to be pressed into uniform and sent off to Vietnam and maybe die in the jungle. Now American citizens can decide whether they want to fight in a war because it's a voluntary military.

That brings us, I believe, then to another obligation as citizens. However much you hate the war, there are those families who have answered the call and you must reach out to them and let them know that it's not a two-tiered society, those who are in uniform and dying and those in civilian clothes for whom nothing is expected. No sacrifices are being made.

Val Zavala>> And in the sixties, society was polarized. Today we are deeply, deeply divided. It is worse now than it was then?

Tom Brokaw>> It was much more polarized then than it is now. Of course, it was. It was very bitter. It was also polarized by race then much more than it is now. People have to remember that.

But what happened as a result of the sixties is that the ideological passions were so great and people were so determined to organize themselves around very extreme or narrow interests that we did become a society in which we retreated to the far corners of the room. There was not much interest in trying to find common cause.

Val Zavala>> But today, we have these divisions, red state-blue state.

Tom Brokaw>> Look, red state-blue state is overblown. It's become a shorthand that is not representative of the country. There is no redder state than Kansas. It has a woman who's a Democrat as governor re-elected to a second term. Arizona, another red state, a Democrat, a woman, elected to a second term.

Montana, a very red state, a Democrat as governor and a divided legislature. Mitt Romney, a straight-laced Republican, was a successful governor in our most blue state, Massachusetts. That should be a signal to the national party leaders that, out in the country, they've found ways of getting solutions to the vexing problems.

Val Zavala>> One of the great quotes you have in here is from an author who said that, meaning the sixties generation, "Ours is the last generation who is cooler than their kids."

Tom Brokaw>> My friend, Tom McEwen, who is a novelist, had hair down to here, lived in Key West, smoked a little dope from time to time, hung out with Jimmy Buffett, married Jimmy Buffett's sister, was a very successful novelist with good reason, then a screenwriter.

He lives now in Montana where he's my neighbor and he's a grandfather. He talks about the fact that they could be cooler than their kids because their kids now have many more pressures on them than they had then.

Val Zavala>> And yet it's interesting that this sixties generation as parents produced what many people feel is a very conservative generation.

Tom Brokaw>> And some of that was a rejection on the part of the children of the boomers to what their parents represented to them. I had a young woman on the telephone saying to me, "My parents were the most narcissistic people in the world and then they got divorced and left me in utter turmoil."

Other boomer parents, once they got to be parents, became utterly controlling as parents. They pushed back against everything their parents represented. When they got to be parents, they hired soccer coaches and Kabuki coaches and sent their kids to kayaking camp and they had tutors for the SAT scores. They micromanaged every part of their lives. So as I say, it's very uneven terrain at that time.

Val Zavala>> So what do you think we've learned from the sixties or have we learned from the sixties? Because we are making --

Tom Brokaw>> -- well, we're still fighting our way through the sixties in many ways. It still defines a lot about who we are. I think we should probably have a national referendum, in a manner of speaking, in 2008 and certainly more conversation about what parts of the sixties are worth keeping and what we should leave behind.

People romanticize the sixties in many instances too much. Other people on the right condemn them far too much. Let's put it all on the table, see if we can have an objective discussion about the merits of the sixties, the advancement of civil rights, the advancement of women. So there are a lot of merits in the sixties that we ought to be cherishing.

Val Zavala>> So when it comes to your personal role in the sixties, were you a participant or more of a spectator?

Tom Brokaw>> Well, I was a weekend kind of faux participant. You know, I didn't really dive into the waters. I've often said I had one foot in the psychedelic waters of the sixties and one foot on the terra firma of the fifties.

Sure, I put on bell-bottom trousers from time to time and peasant shirts and went to the Renaissance Fair in Topanga Canyon. Yeah, I smoked a couple of joints that everyone else did. I inhaled, but it didn't define my life and I left it behind.

Val Zavala>> And you were just starting your career, a very professional career.

Tom Brokaw>> I was. I was here in the midst of it. I always felt that, as one of the younger reporters on the NBC Bureau out here, I was more or less a delegate to the sixties.

Val Zavala>> Tom Brokaw, author of "Boom! Voices of the Sixties", thank you so much for your thoughts.

Tom Brokaw>> My pleasure. A lot of what I went through happened here in California, so it's fun to come back here and talk about it.

Val Zavala>> That's right. Thank you. Tom Brokaw was a guest of Town Hall Los Angeles. If you'd like information on future speakers and events, you should go to their website at townhall-la.org.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
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You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> Mid-century modernism is making a comeback. That's just a fancy word for those kidney-shaped coffee tables we used to have. But did you realize that a lot of local artists helped launch that style worldwide? And now a new exhibit at the Orange County Museum of Art is taking a look at the "Birth of the Cool". Vicki Curry got a tour from the exhibit's curator.

Vicki Curry>> The architecture and design of the mid-twentieth century evokes a lifestyle of elegance, sophistication and glamour.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> A perfect mid-century modernist house is just like a stage. It's a stage for living. It just feels harmonious and serene and beautiful and elegant.

Vicki Curry>> And that's the feeling that curator Elizabeth Armstrong is going for in this exhibition. But she also included the painting, music and film of this time to show how all these different art forms overlapped to create a style called modernism.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> "Birth of the Cool" is about a sensibility, about a style, about a group of artists, architects, musicians who were all working together in the same time and place in southern California at mid-century, and trying to define that sensibility and also look at why we're so interested in it again fifty years later.

Vicki Curry>> The exhibit started with Armstrong's interest in a little-known group of local artists who were called Hard-Edge painters. They were first shown together in 1959 at what was then the Los Angeles County Museum.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> These painters have been so under-documented and under-recognized. There were great artists here and lots of great art being made, but California itself was not being covered the way, say, the art world was in New York, so we know less about it.

Vicki Curry>> Armstrong says the paintings, architecture and even music of the period all emphasized the idea that less is more, and they pay as much attention to the space between things as to the things themselves. A house flows from indoor to outdoor. Music is syncopated. And it's all very different from what was happening on the East Coast.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> It's hot, it's gestural, it's very expressionist. I mean, East Coast, be-bop, jazz. You think of a very dissonant and, you know, dynamic kind of music. California cool jazz tends to be a little more attenuated, a little smoother, a little more laid back.

Vicki Curry>> And the music gave the show its title. It comes from a Miles Davis album called "Birth of the Cool".

Elizabeth Armstrong>> I mean, cool, of course, is still a way to say that something's really good, but it also implies a certain detachment, you know, not trying too hard, a kind of under-stated quality, and that's sort of the vernacular cool. It's also a term we use in architectural history to describe a kind of classical formulism and purity.

So if you look at the paintings and the architectures, it's minimal. You know, it's a very pure aesthetic and that's considered cool as opposed to hot. I was really happy to find a word that had both a street meaning, a vernacular meaning, and a kind of formal and art historical meaning. I thought that was just really cool.

Vicki Curry>> Each art form gets its own space in the exhibition. There's a jazz lounge where visitors can listen to music and look at photographs of the musicians taken by William Claxton, a gallery of paintings, and a furniture display that includes architectural photographs by Julius Shulman.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> We also wanted to have a place or places where they all come together and this is one of several sections where, you know, you get a quintessential piece of furniture by Ray and Charles Eames, although we've installed it as if it were a wonderful art object on the wall, which it is.

Vicki Curry>> But it's a coffee table.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> Totally functional coffee table that you see in a lot of mid-century houses. I love it that it's next to this Greta Grossman lamp, but then next to this wonderful John McLaughlin painting. I made a decision long ago that the power of the show would come from these different disciplines, sort of charging each other and playing off of each other and the confluence between them.

Vicki Curry>> This image is on the cover of the catalog for the exhibition.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> This painting itself is both so quintessential 1950s because of the form and the palette and the energy of it, but also the sense of timelessness. The thing about Karl Benjamin, who was the youngest member of the group of painters we're looking at, is that he was self-taught. I think, more than any of them, in a way he could channel the vernacular, you know, the lava lamp feeling, the boomerang form. He brought those into the paintings, but in a very pure, minimal way.

Now that we sort of realize how much great mid-century modern architecture was built here and designed here and created here, it seemed logical to sort of look at the bigger zeitgeist and community of artists and creative thinkers. You know, I do hope that the show does make the case for this incredible traction in what was going on creatively in southern California at the time.

Vicki Curry>> Armstrong says that southern California's rapid growth and prosperity in the mid-twentieth century attracted artists and innovation.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> You have all the sort of industries that were built up around the war effort retooling and becoming fabricators that lent themselves beautifully to, say, the kind of chairs that the Eames's wanted to design or the kind of continuous sheets of steel and glass that the architects needed to make these perfect, pure houses.

Vicki Curry>> Hollywood's creative community was also a draw. Short films made by furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames are on display here and the exhibition shows how popular culture reflected mid-century modernism and how film and television promoted the style around the world.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> "North by Northwest", for instance, has a sort of famous mid-century modernist house and it becomes the stage for that very important film. Playboy magazine and a television show that Hugh Hefner had called "Playboy's Penthouse" and Hugh Hefner himself were great supporters of the jazz scene.

"Playboy's Penthouse" really captures some of the great performers from the period and you also get a sense of the style of, you know, the people at his parties. So we do include a lot of kind of cultural context in that way and it really adds to the whole show.

Vicki Curry>> That's the hope of "Birth of the Cool", to explore not just this style, but also the role Los Angeles played in creating it.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> I think many of us have always heard what a cultural desert Los Angeles was until recently and, by extension, southern California. I really wanted to test that. I think it is beginning to get the credit it's due.

Vicki Curry>> And that may be because mid-century modernism is hotter today than it was fifty years ago.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> It's becoming so popular, I think, because the paintings are great and the jazz sounds great and the designers were amazing. There's probably some sense of musing about what was that thing, that cool thing, that sensibility that was so serene and beautiful in the 1950s.

Val Zavala>> "Birth of the Cool" will be on display at the Orange County Museum of Art through January 6. For details, go to their website at ocma.net. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

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