This episode, we launch a three-part series from radio art collective, RadioSonideros called Air. Water. Earth. It was first broadcast as part of a floating radio station on the Staten Island Ferry in 2007: The FM Ferry Experiment.  

Also in the show: Mexico City, mega-city of horrid air quality wins a sustainable transport award for it’s  Eco-Bici program…The films of Jean Rouch, and a follow-up to our Pit Bull show.

On this episode of Hear in the City we visit with two extraordinary people who dedicate their lives to caring for pets that 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.

Please visit www.occupuppy.com to find out more about how to help the Downtown Animal Hospital.

On this episode, we take you to the 10 miles of streets where countless thousands of Angelinos had the rare pleasure of walking, cycling, skating, and otherwise propelling themselves on human power, exclusively, for a day during this April’s Ciclavia event. We also spend time with three Chinese students at the University of Southern California in the wake of a tragic killing of two Chinese graduate students in front of their guest home in South Los Angeles. Sara also talks with Jacqueline Hamilton, the host mother of one the students, about the neighborhood where the shooting took place.

On Wednesday, April 11th, at 1am, Qu Ming and Wu Ying, two Chinese graduate students at the University of Southern California were shot by an unidentified assailant while they waited out the rain in a car in front of one of their residences after a late-night study session. Neither one of them survived.

“It could have been any of us” writes fellow student, Mingshi Di, in the Alhambra Source. We interview Mingshi on this week’s show. This photo is from her article.  USC has the largest international student  body in the United States, 2,500 of those students are from China.  The University has offered a $125,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in the killings. A memorial service is held on April 18th at the Shrine Auditorium. You can connect with USC’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association here.

A ride through Ciclavia is full of unusual juxtapositions. At the piñata stretch of East Olympic Blvd., Sunday’s boast an amazing Mexican outdoor tianguis with huaraches, quesadillas, and pollos rostisados in abundance. But this Sunday, you see two-layer bike frames with girls in leopard pants, big buff shirtless men from West Hollywood with shiny strand cruisers, and fuzzy bunnies riding past the bodegas and oil-drums roasting chicken.

]]> http://www.hearinthecity.org/?feed=rss2&p=636 0 http://www.hearinthecity.org/?p=629 http://www.hearinthecity.org/?p=629#comments Wed, 11 Apr 2012 23:06:36 +0000 http://www.hearinthecity.org/?p=629 Continue reading →]]>

This episode is about co-existence. Coyotes live all over the continent of North America, in all sorts of landscapes. But nowhere –across the 50 states– are coyotes as comfortable in an urban setting as they are in Los Angeles. By some counts, 5000 coyotes in live in Southern California. Hear in the City host Sara Harris feels lucky each time she sees a coyote, but arguably most people would feel disconcerted. So, we decided to dedicate a whole episode to the coyote.

Ten years ago, the City of Los Angeles became so overwhelmed with calls about sightings of coyotes in residential neighborhoods that it created a new position: Wildlife Specialist. On this episode Sara interviews Officer Gregory Randall about what we can do to prevent coyotes from coming into backyards and about why it’s people who might pose a bigger problem than it is the animals themselves. In the first half of the show, we visit the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area to talk to one of the authors of Urban Carnivores, and an expert in fragmentation of wildlife ecologies in the urban space, Seth Riley.

Click here for a link to advice on what to do if you are experiencing worrisome wildlife in your immediate area and wonder what you should do. And remember: we are encroaching into the wild landscape with our living spaces, but we do wild animals a favor by dissuading them from entering residential spaces. Don’t leave food where wild animals can reach it, be brash in your interactions with wild carnivores: it’s better they fear you than you fear them, but trapping and shooting is illegal for the average resident.

 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 a ground-breaking, primary social service center in unusual architectural landscape of courtrooms and spaces dedicated to children who have become wards of the foster care system, CASA/LA.

“Japan will hear our vibrations today.” That’s what the man standing behind Sara tells her as they wend their way through the line toward the huge brass bell on platform with a hundred or so other congregants this past Sunday. Mineo Hoshi of the South Coast Interfaith Council explains how to rock the rope so that the log hits the bell hard enough to make a sound. He has plenty more to say about fear and knowledge among humans in the world, so we’ll add this short clip of that moment in the city.

Listen next week at 2:30 PDT on www.kpfk.org.

On our last episode, we heard from residents about the history of oil fields and parkland in the Baldwin Hills, Ladera Heights, Windsor Hills, and Culver City Crest in South Los Angeles. On this week’s show, we hear about two competing visions for living alongside oil extraction in the Baldwin Hills, and we help L.A. local-global nomadic micro cinema, The Echo Park Film Center, celebrate it’s 10th anniversary.

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. We visit the Asco arts exhibition “The Elite of the Obscure” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, we check in with Occupy L.A. as more people gather to protest economic and social inequality on the lawn of City Hall, and we hear a prayer to the sea from the World Festival of Sacred Music and the Kinnara Taiko drum ensemble.

Host Sara Harris interviews Albert Chacon who is Hear in the City’s technical producer and a participant in the Occupy L.A. movement. Arts editor Jesse Lerner talks to co-curators of “The Elite of the Obscure”, Rita Gonzalez and Ondine Chavoya, at LACMA. Johnny Mori of the Kinnara Taiko drumming group performs at a blessing of the sea for the World Festival of Sacred Music.

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 as part of our ongoing series, Two Wheels and a Mic, we sit in on a rehearsal and planning session for the upcoming performance of the Bicycle Bell Ensemble who will use their bicycles as improvisational instrument sin the upcoming Tour da Arts festival with director, Patrick Miller.

The Los Angeles Community Garden Council is part of a national movement to turn abandoned urban lots into public garden space. The garden council recognizes that by managing land that would otherwise be an expense and a liability, they are helping out the city and saving some money. Hear in the City Senior Producer, Luis Sierra Campos, takes us on a tour with Community Garden Council organizer Edgar Flores of the Milagro Allegro garden –one of 70 community gardens that serve close to 4000 families in Los Angeles. Here’s a slide show of photos Luis brought back: [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/27588197[/vimeo]

On this week’s show, we enter the space of a meticulous 24-hour-long video documentation of one entire day in Christian Marclay’s new work, The Clock, we consider the expanded day of June 16th, 1904, as Bloomsday and James Joyce’s Ulysses are recognized by readers around the world, and we start the show with news of the early release of convicted Bay Area Transit cop Johannes Mehserle, less than one year after his sentencing for the killing of a young, unarmed black man on a train platform in Oakland, 22-year-old Oscar Grant.

Listen to the archive here:

Reporter Thandisizwe Chimurenga has covered Oscar Grant’s shooting and Johannes Mehserle’s trial. She was at the Los Angeles County jail in the early hours of Monday morning when Mehserle was released from the Los Angeles County jail after serving less than one year of an involuntary manslaughter sentence for killing Oscar Grant.